THE 



BIBLE VERIFIED. 



BY THE ^i 

REV. ANDREW W. ARCHIBALD. 



WITH AN 

INTRODUCTORY NOTE 

By PROF. RANSOM B. WELCH, D. D., LL.D., 

Of Auburn Theological Seminary. 



30 



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TO HIS CHILDREN, 
WARREN, KENNETH AND CECIL, 

THIS VOLUME IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED 

BY THE AUTHOR. 



PREFACE. 



The following pages were not originally pre- 
pared with any thought of publication. They are 
sermons that have been preached in the ordinary 
course of a busy pastorate. They were not a set 
series of discourses even. In these days of biblical 
criticism questions as to the authority of the Script- 
ures have arisen from time to time. To answer 
these inquiries, which have made their way into 
the popular mind, a sermon would be preached 
along one line, and in the course of time another 
along a different line. So doubtful was the author 
about launching a volume upon the sea of public 
thought that he concluded to offer for publication 
what he has written only on the condition of a fa- 
vorable judgment and of encouragement from two 
of his former highly-esteemed instructors — Prof. 
E. B. Welch, D. D., LL.D., formerly of Union 
College (later of Auburn Theological Seminary), 



,; PREFACE. 

and Prof. G. E. Day, D. D., of the Yale Divinity 
do] and one of the American Old-Testament 
( fcmmittee In the preparation of the Revised Ver- 
sion of the Scriptures. 

The author hopes that both clergy and laity may 
find the book to be stimulating and helpful, and 
that they may discover no glaring mistakes in 
statements of fact or in expressions of opinion. 
Where there is room for different conclusions he 
has simply stated his own, without a nice balancing 
of arguments pro and con. which would be unsuit- 
able for the pulpit. 

He frankly confesses to leaning toward the con- 
servative side of the issues raised by the Higher 
Criticism. In the fulfillment of prophecy he cannot 
Speak disparagingly, as one eminent Christian scholar 
does, of dwelling upon " remarkable minute corre- 
Bpondenoes between old-time prognostications and 
new-time events." He is ready to be as old-fash- 
ioned as the New-Testament writers, who did see in 
the minutiae of history secondary, if not primary, 
fulfillment of previous predictions. Some examples 
may be mentioned. Prediction in Zechariah : " Be- 
hold, thy King cometh unto thee: . . . lowly, 
and riding upon an ass, even upon a colt the foal 
of an ass " ; corresponding fact to which John calls 



PREFACE. 7 

attention : u And Jesus, having found a young ass, 
sat thereon." Prediction in Isaiah : " He opened 
not his mouth " ; fact in Matthew : " And he gave 
him no answer, not even to one word." Prediction 
in the Psalms : " In my thirst they gave me vine- 
gar to drink w ; fact in Matthew : " One of them 
ran, and took a sponge, and filled it with vinegar, 
and put it on a reed, and gave him to drink." 
Prediction in the Psalms : " They part my gar- 
ments among them, and upon my vesture do they 
cast lots " ; fact in John : " The soldiers therefore, 
when they had crucified Jesus, took his garments, 
and made four parts, to every soldier a part ; and 
also the coat: now the coat was without seam, 
woven from the top throughout. They said there- 
fore one to another, Let us not rend it, but cast lots 
for it, whose it shall be." Prediction in Exodus 
regarding the paschal lamb : " Neither shall ye 
break a bone thereof" ; fact in John regarding the 
Lamb of God : " When they came to Jesus, they 
brake not his legs." Prediction in Zechariah : 
" They shall look unto me whom they have 
pierced " ; fact in John : " Howbeit one of the sol- 
diers with a spear pierced his side." These illus- 
trations — and they might be multiplied — are suffi- 
cient to justify not only the tracing of great lines 



8 PREFACE. 

of prophecy, but also the verifying in detail of 

predictions. 

No claim is made to originality. The writer is 
indebted to the standard authorities along the va- 
rious lines of his research. Professor Welch has 
kindly written an Introductory Note, for which the 
Author is grateful. The writer also desires to say 
how he has been reassured in a sometimes wavering 
purpose by private letters (quoted by permission) 
from Professor Day, who in the reading of the 
manuscript was " increasingly interested" as he 
proceeded, who bore testimony to the " fresh and 
popular treatment given to the interesting subjects 
discussed," and who recognized in the discourses 
"grasp of thought and fullness of illustration and 
balance of judgment." 

The Author would simply add that the volume 
includes two sermons written after he had submitted 
hifl manuscript to his scholarly critics, and, not 
wishing to trouble them further, he ventures to 
insert without their critical supervision the dis- 
courses on " Formidable Objections to the Bible" 
and " Biblical Signs preceding the Destruction of 
Jerusalem." 

A. W. A. 



INTRODUCTORY NOTE. 

By Professor RANSOM B. WELCH. 



It gives me pleasure to say that when a professor 
in college I knew the author of these sermons as a 
student. He was diligent, accurate, trustworthy; 
waiting ever to report until he had found; then 
reporting unostentatiously, but truthfully and sym- 
pathetically, what he had found. 

This gave assurance that if he ever ventured 
into authorship he would be an honest writer, aim- 
ing to furnish real information, striving earnestly to 
convince others because of his own thorough con- 
viction, patiently guiding and lovingly helping 
others because he himself by patience and hope 
had sought and found. 

His is a judicial rather than a partisan spirit, 
loyal to the truth, yet liberal toward honest doubt 
and sincere search — the more tolerant because the 
more truthful. 

9 



1 1 ) IS TR OD UCTOR Y NO TE. 

The genera] subject of the book is important. 
Tin* particular topics are timely. The treatment is 
irons and truthful. The style is clear, compact 
and in keeping with the plan and purpose of the 
inns. The book is never dull, while it is 
always instructive, and at times especially impress- 
ive and quickening. It mainly pursues the historic 
method, which, if not the exclusive, is the most 
ready and effective, method for such a course of ser- 
mons. The author does not claim to be original, 
but wisely avails himself of facts both recent and 
remote in almost every field of investigation. 
These facts are not only informing, but they 
serve also the twofold purpose of argumentation 
and illustration, stimulating the attention while 
they convince the judgment. 

The book cannot fail to reflect credit upon the 
author and light upon the reader. 

We heartily commend it to all who would the 
better understand some of the vital questions of 
these stirring times — who would search the Script- 
\wr< % especially to seek and find the truth as it is 
in J< 

Ransom B. Welch. 
Auburn Theo. Seminary. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

INTRODUCTORY NOTE, By Prof. K. B. Welch . . 9 

CHAPTER I. 
The Canon ; or, What Constitutes the Bible? . . 13 

CHAPTER II. 
The Bible in Manuscript 25 

CHAPTER III. 
The Bible in English 39 

CHAPTER IV. 
The Inspiration of the Bible 52 

CHAPTER V. 
The Bible and the Miraculous 65 

CHAPTER VI. 
Formidable Objections to the Bible 79 

CHAPTER VII. 

Incidental Confirmations of the Bible 91 

11 



1 2 CONTENTS. 

CHAPTEK VIII. 

PAGE 

The Bible and Science; or, the Creative Week . 108 

CHAPTEK IX. 
The Bible and the Mummies of the Pharaohs . 121 

CHAPTEK X. 
Elevating Influence of the Bible 136 

CHAPTEK XI. 
The Bible and the Golden City of Babylon . . 151 

CHAPTEK XII. 
The Bible and the Commercial City of Tyre . . 164 

CHAPTEK XIII. 
Biblical Signs Preceding the Destruction of Je- 
rusalem 279 

CHAPTEK XIV. 
The Bible and the Destruction of Jerusalem . . 190 

CHAPTEK XV. 
The Bible and the Peculiar Jews 202 



THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 



CHAPTER I. 



THE CANON; OR, WHAT CONSTITUTES THE 
BIBLE? 

" Ye search the Scriptures, because ye think that in them ye 
have eternal life ; and these are they which bear witness of 
Me."— John 5 : 39. 

AVERY natural inquiry in these days, when 
we are searching for the foundations of things, 
is, What exactly is the Bible ? What books con- 
stitute the Scriptures ? " These are they," says our 
text, indicating a definite number. 

1. The reference, of course, is simply to the Old 
Testament, and the contents of this have been fixed 
for ages with tolerable certainty. While the books 
from Genesis to Malachi were composed at different 
points of a period covering more than a thousand 
years, they seem to have been gathered into one 
sacred collection some four hundred years before 
the Christian era. They were arranged under 
three great divisions, which Christ once called the 
Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms. This meant 

13 



1 j THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

Bometkfag specific, for we find the same threefold 
division used by the son of Sirach at least 130 B. a, 
and by Philo, who was born only a few years 
before Christ, and by Josephus, who was born 
37 A. D. It was as if different persons to-day 
should refer to the three volumes of Motley's Dutch 
Republic, It would prove that such a work existed 
and in that form. Both Philo and Josephus quote 
from each of the three great divisions and from 
most of the individual books, giving us the same 
evidence for the genuineness of the Old Testament 
88 we would have for Motley's Dutch Republic if 
different authors should quote from each volume 
and from nearly every separate chapter. 

Josephus even gives the precise number of books 
comprised in the whole — " only twenty two," he 
Bays. But that contradicts the number at present 
received, does it not ? We count thirty-nine. The 
variation is easily explained. Originally there was 
not the arbitrary division into First and Second 
of Chronicles, First and Second of Kings, First and 
Second of Samuel. These double books were each 
considered one, as they properly are. In like 
manner, the Lamentations of Jeremiah were joined 
to h\< prophecy, Ruth was attached to Judges (of 
which it is a continuation), Ezra and Nehemiah 
were reckoned as one because they treated of the 
same period, and the twelve Minor Prophets natu- 
rally fell into one class. With a grouping of this 
kind we can easily get the " only twenty-two books " 



THE CANON. 15 

in the Old Testament, and Josephus was particular 
about having it twenty-two, that it might conform 
to the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet. 
When, then, the text speaks of the Scriptures as 
" these are they," it refers to exactly the same 
books, according to these ancient witnesses, as are 
now in our possession. 

Again, all down the ages of the Christian era 
our present books are frequently named, giving us 
a continuous line of testimony. It should also be 
remembered that the Old-Testament Scriptures for 
nineteen centuries have been held in sacred trust 
by two great religious parties of antagonistic beliefs, 
the Jews and Christians. It is as though, to use 
the illustration of another, they were guarding 
"the same casket of jewels," and a single gem 
could not have been removed without detection by 
the other. It is the strongest kind of evidence, 
when opposing parties thus agree, that each has 
been honest in neither adding to nor subtracting 
from the holy oracles, for the Hebrew Bible of the 
Jew is the Old Testament of the Christian. 

But how about the Apocrypha? The Roman 
Catholics, you are aware, at the Council of Trent 
in 1546 formally adopted it as a part of the Bible. 
But Josephus expressly says that it was not " of 
the like authority " with the Scriptures, and Philo 
does not refer to it authoritatively as he does to the 
Old Testament, and it is not endorsed by New- 
Testament references, as the recognized Jewish 



1G THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

Canon was, except that Jude endorses a sentiment 
from the apocryphal book of Enoch, much as Paul 
adopted a sentiment of a Greek poet in the sermon 
to the Athenians. How, then, did the Apocrypha 
ever become associated with the Old Testament? 
The explanation is, that the Jews of Alexandria 
had the Scriptures translated into Greek, which 
they spoke in Egypt. To this Greek or Septuagint 
version (which was begun about 280 B.C.) other 
Jewish books, written after the prophetic age, were 
added from time to time for convenient use eccle- 
siastically or because of laxer views entertained in 
Egypt than in Palestine. Now, since Greek came 
into wider use than any other language, this Greek 
translation, with its Apocrypha attached to the Old- 
Testament Scriptures, became the Bible with which 
most people were familiar, and by degrees the dis- 
tinction between the Old Testament and Apocrypha 
became effaced. Thus all down the centuries there 
have been individuals who have reckoned the 
Apocrypha as inspired, and the Council of Trent 
finally committed the Papal Church to that position. 
Even Protestants long had a lingering feeling of 
reverence for the Apocrypha, and hence bound it in 
with the Scriptures, where it should not be, because 
it is not recognized as Scripture by Josephus, Philo, 
or the New-Testament writers. When Christ said, 
u These are they," he referred to the Old Testa- 
ment alone as existing in the threefold division of 
the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms. 



THE CAS OX. 17 

2. While we are thus clear as to the contents of 
the Old Testament, we may not be so sure as to 
what constitutes the New, for the great Teacher 
never pointed out the Xew-Testament books, since 
they were not written till after his death. So far 
as the Old Testament was concerned, he only 
endorsed what the general religious consciousness 
had decided beforehand. The limits of the Old 
Testament were fixed at least two or three centuries 
before he was born, and that not by any miraculous 
interposition, but by a providential agreement among 
the most pious and enlightened as to what was 
inspired. That is the way in which the proper 
contents of the Xew Testament have been deter- 
mined. It was a matter of growth through devout 
criticism. Some thought such a book was inspired, 
and some another; some that this one ought to be 
rejected, and some that that one ought to be ; and 
so arguments were balanced until there was a 
general agreement among the vast majority of 
Christians, the exceptions being rare. That is how 
we got our Xew Testament. It was not let down 
in a body from heaven, it was not compiled by the 
apostles. No divine hand selected its different 
books with the utterance, " These are they." The 
inspired Gospels and Epistles did not come to us 
as magical formularies, but as writings historically 
belonging to the apostolic age. There is nothing 
mysterious or mythical in their origin ; they come 
to us as history. 
2 



1 9 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

Glancing at the first few centuries of the Chris- 
tian era, we can see how the New Testament was 
formed— not suddenly and miraculously, but gradu- 
ally and naturally. We see it quoted again and 
again by writers of the second and third centuries. 
Bere is Clement of Rome, for instance, at the end of 
the first century even (95 A. d.), using expressions 
found in Hebrews, and in writing to the Corin- 
thians he says : " Take up the Epistle of the blessed 
Paul the apostle ; what was it that he first wrote to 
you . . . V Clement quotes from or alludes to 
sixteen of the New-Testament books. Ignatius, 
who suffered martyrdom not far from 107 A. D., 
in addressing the Ephesians speaks of a "letter" 
to them by " St. Paul, the sanctified and martyred," 
and he has repeated references to various New-Tes- 
tament books. Polycarp, who was burned at the 
stake 155 or 167 A. d., and who, says Irenaeus, a 
disciple of his, had often talked "with the apostle 
John and with the rest who had seen the Lord," — 
Polycarp tells the Philippians to " look diligently " 
into what had been written them by the " blessed 
and glorious Paul ;" and he shows a knowledge of 
three of the Gospels and at least of thirteen of the 
Epistles. The three, Clement, Ignatius, and Poly- 
carp, refer to all of the New-Testament books except 
tnd and Third John and Jude. 

Justin Martyr, who wrote about 150 A. D., speaks 
of a " revelation which was made" to John, and he 
refers either directly or indirectly to nearly every 



THE CANON. 19 

New-Testament book. Irenseus, who flourished 
from 130 to 200 A. D., uses this language: " Peter 
says in his Epistle " ; also, " Paul, when writing to 
the Romans " ; and he quotes from or alludes to 
every book in the New Testament except Philemon 
and Third John, and there are only fifty-four chap- 
ters to which he has no reference. Tertullian (born 
about 150 A. d.) quotes from all of the New-Testa- 
ment books except four, and possibly two. Clem- 
ent of Alexandria (160 to 220 A. d.) seems to al- 
lude to all except two. Origen (born about 186 A. 
D.) has citations embracing, it is asserted by Tre- 
gelles, two-thirds of the entire New Testament. It 
is even claimed that an English lord has found in the 
writings of the first three centuries the whole New 
Testament with the exception of eleven verses. To 
such an extent have the apostolic writings been 
woven into the earliest literature of our era that 
their genuineness cannot be doubted. They are a 
part of history. 

While they can thus be clearly traced back to 
the beginning, there was more or less confusion at 
first as to their divine authority. The line was not 
at once sharply drawn separating them from other 
writings and making them pre-eminently sacred. 
Irenaeus, for example, quoted as "Scripture" the 
" Shepherd " of Hermas, who probably wrote it a 
little before the middle of the second century. 
Clement of Alexandria also considered it "divine" 
or inspired, as he did the Epistle of the Roman 



THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

( ']« incut (95 A. d.), and as he did that of Barnabas, 
whose date is not later than 125 A. D. These writ- 
ings arc close to the apostolic age, and they were 
n«»t infrequently read in the churches as Scripture. 
They have come down to us, and are very inter- 
esting, but are uninspired, as we think. Their 
inspiration was also denied by many from the out- 
An ancient catalogue (the Muratorian Frag- 
ment, 150 to 170 A. D.), while including all of the 
New Testament except First and Second of Peter, 
James and Hebrews, rejects the "Shepherd," be- 
cause of its having been composed "recently, in our 
own times, by Hernias, while his brother Pius was 
bishop of the see of Rome." In the course of time 
it was universally rejected as uncanonical, as also were 
the Epistles of Clement and Barnabas. The same 
fate awaited a work called the " Apocalypse of 
Peter," which at one time was received in some 
quarters. 

In other words, here were writings (and there 
were still others) which many used to consider 
Scripture, but which eventually were dropped out 
of the list of sacred books. There was no formal 
vote taken on their rejection, but they gradually 
came to be regarded by the Church at large as 
of inferior rank. There was a sifting process going 
on. Here would be a letter claiming to be Paul's, 
there another claiming to be Peter's. What was 
the truth? Each case was discussed, not in an 
ecclesiastical council, but by the general Church. 



THE CANON. 21 

Some would take the affirmative, and some the neg- 
ative, and thus one book after another was con- 
sidered on its merits, and in this way the canon 
was formed. It took several centuries to come 
with anything like unanimity to the result which 
is now almost universally accepted as correct. 
This is what might have been expected. Away 
in the East would be an apostolic letter which the 
people of the West would know nothing about for 
fifty or a hundred years, and therefore results were 
reached slowly. It was a question as to whether 
several of the present New-Testament books should 
be admitted — a question raised not by infidels, but 
by Christians. 

The witnesses were perfectly frank and honest. 
Origen testifies that Peter left one Epistle, "and 
perhaps a second, for that is disputed." He also 
says, " John wrote the Apocalypse (Revelation) and 
an Epistle of very few lines ; and it may be a sec- 
ond and a third, since all do not admit them to be 
genuine." In quoting from James and Jude he 
adds that their canonioity was doubted. Eusebius 
(born about 270 A. D.) gives in his church history 
a list of the New-Testament books. He classes the 
great majority as among the " universally acknowl- 
edged." As acknowledged " by the most " he 
names Jude, James, Second Peter, Second and Third 
John. Revelation, he says, "some reject, while 
others reckon it among the books acknowledged," 
although in his opinion it would be received by all 



22 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

in " due " time. The candid weighing of evidence 
continued, until Athanasius (365 A. d.), in naming 
the contents of the canon, gave the exact books 
which we have, and only those. Eusebius and 
Athanasius were as near to the apostles as we are 
to the Landing of the Pilgrims. Jerome, who 
died 420 A. D., adopted the same list that we now 
have. 

Councils about this time " sanctioned and rati- 
fied," as another has said, " what had already taken 
place spontaneously " and by a " steady growth." 
Thus have the limits of our New Testament been 
fixed by the general Christian consciousness guided 
by historical data. No council decided the matter, 
no heavenly voice did, but the result has been 
reached by patient comparing of views. There is 
not perfect unanimity yet on the part of the Chris- 
tian world. Now and then a devout scholar at 
present doubts the canonical authority of the Second 
and Third of John or the Second of Peter ; but even 
if these were rejected the system of Christianity 
would not be affected, any more than would the 
facts of our Civil War be disproved if it should turn 
out that some historian did not write certain two or 
three chapters of the work bearing his name. Still, 
the almost universal sentiment accepts all the books 
of the present New Testament, so that we can say of 
them, as Christ said of the Old-Testament books, 
"These are they," confident that they constitute the 
true word of God. 



THE CANON. 23 

Our Bible comes to us not by magic or witchery 
of any kind, but through historical channels, and 
if some new apostolic writing were discovered it 
could properly be admitted into the canon, not 
because of some miraculous endorsement from the 
sky, but on historical grounds ; and it seems to be 
historically probable that inspired Epistles have 
been lost. Paul, for instance, in 1 Cor. 5 : 9 says : 
" I wrote unto you in my Epistle," thus alluding 
to a letter previously written to the Corinthians, 
but this is not now extant. And in Col. 4 : 
16 he says, " When this Epistle has been read 
among you, cause that it be read also in the church 
of the Laodiceans; and that ye also read the Epis- 
tle from Laodicea ;" but we have no letter to the 
Laodiceans, unless the Epistle to the Ephesians was, 
as some think, a circular letter designed also for the 
Laodiceans. Now, if these two lost Epistles of 
the apostle to which he refers should ever be un- 
earthed, they would go through the same course of 
criticism as our present New-Testament books went 
through, and if the wellnigh universal opinion 
should in the end be favorable to their authenticity, 
they could consistently be placed with Paul's other 
letters. That is, our Bible has not a mythical, but 
an historical, basis, and it stands all the stronger 
before the world for that reason. 

AVe do not worship ignorantly; ours is not 
a blind superstition ; we believe on evidence. \Te 
challenge attention to the origin of our sacred 



24 THE BIBLE VERIFIED, 

books. They were not produced, to use a Pauline 
expression, " in a corner." They have been open 
to all from the beginning, so that whosoever would 
might read. Let us be grateful to a kind Provi- 
dence which has so worked them into the very 
warp and woof of history that their credibility 
cannot be attacked without taking issue with the 
great fact of human development itself. Our faith 
is founded on the clear word of God, and there we 
rest as on a rock, upon which the tide of infidelity 
has been beating in vain for all the centuries that 
are past. The waves of skeptical assault have 
broken upon it only to be dissipated into spray and 
foam. The grand old Bible seems to lift itself in 
triumph after each shock, exactly as the rock 
appears to emerge from the breakers when the 
ocean tide has spent its force. 



CHAPTER II. 

THE BIBLE IN MANUSCRIPT. 

" The cloak that I left at Troas with Carpus, bring when 
thou comest, and the books, especially the parchments." — 
2 Tim. 4 : 13. 

rpHIS was a message sent by Paul from his prison 
J- at Rome to Timothy, whom the apostle de- 
sired to come and see him, and not to forget to 
fetch the books, and especially the parchments, left 
behind with a friend at Troas. We do not know 
what important works these were. They may have 
contained some of his own inspired Epistles, and 
very likely portions at least of the Old-Testament 
Scriptures, for he was a man who read his Bible. 
The sacred writings were to him very precious. 
Perhaps he had been hurried off to the Roman im- 
prisonment without being permitted to take his 
books, among which, we may be sure, would be 
the Holy Scriptures. 

He could not send out and get a copy of the 
Bible for a trifling amount, as we can now. When 
a work is rare it is expensive. For instance, one 
of the very first printed books was the Latin Bible 
in 1546, and a copy of this edition not long ago 

25 



26 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

sold in New York for eight thousand dollars, while 
an English earl paid for a copy over sixteen thou- 
sand dollars. The rarity of the work is what con- 
stitutes its value, and in the apostolic age, before 
the days of printing, books were rare, as they are 
not now, when with stereotype plates they can be 
produced with ease, rapidity and economy. There 
was then no such thing as a press to run off large 
editions. If a second copy was wanted, it had to 
be laboriously written out by hand. 

There were those who made this copying a 
distinct business. Paul had an amanuensis, for 
in Rom. 16 : 22 we read, ' I, Tertius, who wrote 
the Epistle, salute you." The apostle only added 
a postscript in his own familiar chirography, as we 
learn from 1 Cor. 16 : 21 : " The salutation of me 
Paul with mine own hand." 

The writing was done upon two kinds of material. 
From the reeds which grew along the Nile was 
manufactured an article called papyrus, resembling, 
yet different from, our paper. Then the skins of 
young antelopes and other animals were dressed 
into a fine sort of vellum, which was more durable, 
and as a consequence more costly, than the former. 
When Paul sent for "the books, especially the 
parchments," it was literally for the papyrus rolls 
and the vellum rolls, and the latter particularly he 
w T anted because they were worth more. 

But he did not wish either of them to be lost. 
He perhaps was afraid they might be carelessly 



THE BIBLE IN MANUSCRIPT. 27 

thrown aside and destroyed. If they contained any 
of his Epistles, the fate of these he would naturally 
fear. He might have heard the story of Aristotle's 
priceless works long lying unknown in a cellar, 
where, fortunately, after two centuries, they w T ere 
discovered. The apostle's fears were justified, as 
we of modern times can see better than he did. 
How much of literature has been nearly lost, being 
only providentially — or, as we say, accidentally — 
recovered ! The great work of Quintilian was 
brought to light in the fifteenth century from a 
dark and filthy dungeon. There have been the 
most romantic discoveries of this kind. A copy 
of Propertius, the Latin poet, was found stained 
and crumpled under the casks of a wine-cellar. 
Three hundred lines of Homer's Odyssey were 
taken from the hands of a mummy. The original 
manuscript of Magna Charta, that great charter of 
English liberty and constitutional freedom in gen- 
eral, was saved at the critical moment when a tailor 
was about to cut it into patterns. In 1626 a 
German in excavating for a new house on the site 
of an old one came upon a well- wrapped parcel, 
which proved to be Luther's Table Talk, the only 
copy in existence, and a most valuable work because 
of the vivid picture which it gives of the Reform- 
er's life and times. 

These discoveries have been odd enough, but 
there is a still stranger way in which literary treas- 
ures once lost have been found. The vellum, the 



THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

parchment, mentioned in the text, which was pre- 
pared from skins, was so very costly that it was 
frequently cleansed and used again after the manner 
ct' a -late The vegetable ink was as nearly obliter- 
ated as possible, but in the course of time the old 
characters have reappeared, very indistinct and yet 
visible. Once in a while the vellum has been cleaned 
a second time, and a third writing has been com- 
mitted to its face. In either case great skill is 
required to decipher the first characters. Still, it 
has been done, and behold, a long-lost work of 
Cicero and other classics have thus been given to 
the world! Providence has in this way cared for 
the Bible. 

In the National Library at Paris there long lay 
an ancient document containing sermons and other 
compositions of Ephraem of Syria, a Church Father 
of the fourth century. The preservation of his 
writings was fortunate, but underneath these were at 
last discovered traces of another text. This was in 
the latter half of the seventeenth century. Vari- 
ous attempts were made to decipher the old and 
obscured characters, but without success till about 
fifty years ago, when by chemical appliances the 
hidden text was made out and published. It 
proved to be a manuscript of the larger portion 
of the New Testament, dating back to the fifth 
century. In the twelfth century some copyist had 
taken the leaves apart, erased the old text, and 
written in its place the works of Ephraem, while the 



THE BIBLE IN MANUSCRIPT. 2S 

whole was bound together anew. In the new vol- 
ume formed the leaves were all disarranged, and 
many of them were upside down, so far as the first 
writing was concerned. This made the decipherment 
all the more difficult to the scholar who undertook 
the confusing task; who, however, succeeded, and 
the result is one of the best manuscript authorities 
we have in biblical criticism. Who could have ever 
imagined that a writing of the fifth century would 
thus be made to reveal its secrets to the nineteenth 
century? Well may we exclaim, What hath God 
wrought ! He has evidently had all the solicitude 
that Paul had for valuable parchments. When we 
realize that many precious manuscripts have been 
lost, we can appreciate the apostle's anxiety for 
those books and parchments at Troas. 

Xone of the original manuscripts of the Bible 
have been preserved. Shall we therefore reject this 
book? As well might we throw away the works 
of Homer, who flourished from eight to nine hun- 
dred years before Christ, but of whose writings 
we have no complete copy older than the thirteenth 
century, and no fragments even older than the 
sixth century — fifteen centuries after the blind poet 
died. Of the history by Herodotus there is no 
manuscript extant earlier than the ninth century, 
but this historian lived in the fifth century before 
the Christian era. There is no copy of Plato pre- 
vious to the ninth century, and he wrote consider- 
ably more than a thousand years before that. Less 



30 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

than three hundred years intervene between the 
oldest Bible manuscripts and the apostolic age. 
What if we do not have the original manuscripts 
of the inspired volume? Must we read every 
author in his own handwriting? Do we have 
II nine and Gibbon and Bancroft and Motley in 
manuscript in our libraries? No, but we have no 
doubt of possessing their works. It is a matter of 
history that they have lived and that they wrote 
the books going under their respective names. So 
arc \\ e Bure of the genuineness of the sacred books. 
We have none of the original manuscripts, but all 
through the second and third and successive cen- 
turies the New and Old Testaments are quoted, and 
therefore must have been in existence. And so far 
as manuscripts are concerned, we have older ones 
of the Scriptures than of any uninspired writings. 
The method of determining their age might here 
be briefly indicated. The Bible has at different 
times been differently divided, not always into our 
present chapters and verses. About 340 a. d. 
divisions of a certain order were introduced (a sys- 
tem perfected by Eusebius), and about 460 A. D. 
divisions of another order (the stichometrical) be- 
came prevalent. Now, of course, if a manuscript 
contains the Eusebian divisions the date must be 
after 3 10 a. d. ; if the stichometrical, after 460 A. D. 
If an old Bible should come into your hands with- 
out any date, the question would be, When was it 
printed ? A friend suggests that it must have been 



THE BIBLE IN MANUSCRIPT, 31 

issued from the press as early as 1500 A. D., but 
you say no, and you call attention to the present 
verse division. Well, what of it? Nothing, only 
that that fact shows the printing to have been after 
the year 1551, when this verse arrangement was 
first made. In ways like this the age of manu- 
scripts is learned with great precision, and thus has 
it been proved that, though we do not have the 
original manuscripts of the Bible, we do have 
parchments of very great antiquity. How grateful 
we should be to God who has so wonderfully 
guarded them through the ages, thus giving us 
stronger testimony for the authenticity of the Script- 
ures than for that of the ancient classics ! Our 
faith should be strengthened by evidence so conclu- 
sive, and our affections ought to cluster around the 
parchments as tenaciously as did PauPs. Three of 
these manuscripts, because of their great age, de- 
serve special notice. 

1. The Alexandrian Manuscript is assigned to the 
fifth century. The translators who gave us the 
King James version of the Scriptures did not have 
access to it, for they finished their work in 1611, 
whereas 1628 was the year when this manuscript 
was donated to Charles the First of England by 
the patriarch of Constantinople, who got it in 
Egypt at Alexandria, and hence the name, Alexan- 
drian Manuscript. It is now in the British Mu- 
seum, so fragile that it is kept under glass and the 
use of it is confined to scholars, who have access to 



32 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

it for textual purposes. The vellum is somewhat 
decayed, there beiug holes in it, and some of the 
letters are worn aw T ay along the margin. Whole 
leaves are missing. More than twenty-four chap- 
ters of Matthew have at some time dropped out, 
and there are other omissions. It, however, con- 
tains most of the Old and New Testaments, besides 
other writings, including the only genuine Epistle 
of Clement to the Corinthians — that Clement who 
died about the year 100, and who is supposed to be 
the one mentioned by Paul in Philippians (4 : 3) as 
a fellow-worker. 

2. Of still higher value is the Vatican Manu- 
script, in the Papal Library at Rome. The first 
trace we get of it is in the year 1475, when it 
appears in a catalogue, the earliest made of the 
library. When Napoleon was at the zenith of his 
power it was transferred to Paris, but in 1815 came 
Waterloo, and the manuscript was returned to 
Rome, where ever since it has been jealously 
guarded, especially from Protestant inspection. 
The great English critic Tregelles, with a com- 
mendatory letter from a cardinal, went in 1845 
to examine it, but he was closely watched by 
two prelates, who took the precaution to search 
his pockets and to remove therefrom pen, paper 
and ink, and if he was noticed giving particular 
attention to any passage, the volume was snatched 
from his hands. He only succeeded in making, 
unobserved, some uotes upon his cuffs and finger- 



THE BIBLE IN MANUSCRIPT. 33 

nails. In 1866, Tisehendorf, the eminent German 
scholar, was more successful, giving the world 
a complete copy. While it lacks a large part 
of Genesis, thirty of the Psalms, Titus, Timothy, 
Revelation and still other parts, it comprises the 
bulk of the Old and New Testaments. It belongs 
to the fourth century, and is thus a hundred years 
earlier than the Alexandrian. It may be one of 
the fifty copies of the Greek Scriptures which the 
emperor Constantine ordered to be prepared about 
331 A. D., and which, when finished, were conveyed 
to him, says our authority, " in one of the govern- 
ment wagons " for the imperial inspection. Whether 
it be one of those copies or not, it, at any rate, 
according to the best critics, dates back to 300 or 
325 a. d. 

3. To the same century, the fourth, belongs 
another manuscript, the narrative of whose dis- 
covery a few years ago, not at Troas, but at Sinai, 
reads like a romance. The hero is Tischendorf, 
whose first name (Lobegott) means in German 
" Praise God v — a name given him out of gratitude, 
we are told, because " a strange fear of the mother 
that her babe would be born blind had not come 
true." And he was by no means born blind. No 
man ever had keener sight, and he spent his life in 
deciphering old manuscripts which other eyes could 
not read. He believed there were many of these 
" hidden in dust and darkness." 

He started on a tour of investigation, and in 

3 



3 I THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

Maw 1844, he was in the vicinity of Sinai, where 
the Law was given through Moses, and where at 
this time was a group of anti ue buildings called 
the Convent of St. Catharine. For many centuries 
it had been the home of a brotherhood of monks. 
A rich library had grown up in the distant past, but 
the spirit of learning had long since died out. The 
convent was now occupied by twenty or thirty ig- 
norant hermits, who practiced their monastic rites 
and entertained travelers as occasion offered. It 
was a peculiar haunt or retreat, being enclosed by a 
wall forty feet in height. The place of entrance was 
thirty feet high, and to this aperture or door in the 
wall the visitor had to be elevated " by a rope." Up 
this rope Tischendorf first sent his credentials, and, 
these being satisfactory, he himself was hauled up. 

He had access to the library, and while examin- 
ing the volumes on the shelves he noticed a basket 
of waste material on the floor awaiting use as kin- 
dling, two basketfuls of similar fragments having 
already served that purpose. Picking over the 
musty pieces, he came upon several leaves of the 
Old Testament in Greek, evidently very ancient. 
He was allowed to take forty-three of these leaves, 
but the rest of the manuscript had assumed a new 
value now that the learned stranger seemed anxious 
ft>r it- possession. He departed, telling the monks 
to take good care of what remained, and he returned 
home, depositing the forty-three leaves in the Uni- 
versity Library at Leipzig. 



THE BIBLE IN MANUSCRIPT. . 35 

Some years passed away, but he did not forget 
the treasure left behind at Sinai. He tried twice — 
once through a friend and again in person — to se- 
cure the parchment or at least a copy of the manu- 
script, but he failed. With credentials from the 
Czar of Russia, the head of the Greek Church, he 
was once more in the Sinaitic convent in the year 
1859, but the long-desired treasure was nowhere to 
be seen, and he was about to leave disappointed 
when one afternoon he and the steward of the con- 
vent walked out together, coming back about sun- 
down. The conversation had been about books, and 
the steward, inviting him into his cell for supper, 
brought from a corner a bulky volume wrapped 
in red cloth. The scholarly German immediately 
recognized the book ; there were some of the very 
leaves he had rescued from the waste-basket fifteen 
years before. 

This Sinaitic Manuscript contained most of the 
Old Testament, the whole of the Xew, besides the 
Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hernias, 
the authors of which both flourished before 140 A. d. 
Tischendorf, concealing his emotions to the best of 
his ability, asked carelessly if he could take the vol- 
ume to his room and look it over more leisurely. 
Once out of sight with it, he " fairly danced for 
joy." All night long by the dim light of a candle 
he was engaged in copying. He managed to keep 
control of it long enough to get a complete copy, and 
the original itself was finally gotten to St. Petersburg 



THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

"under the form of a loan," and the loan seems 
likely to be made perpetual, though not without 
bitter protest from theowners. Fac-simile copies 
have been made of it and donated to various great 
libraries. 

Bach arc the most ancient manuscripts which 
have appeared in modern times to assist in estab- 
lishing the word of God. Their preservation has 
been marvelous, providential and almost mirac- 
ulous. The last two of them are so old they may- 
have been read by Eusebius when our ancestors 
were barbarians who could neither read nor write. 
They put the Scriptures on a surer basis than exists 
for Homer, Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero or 
any other ancient author. 

Still stronger manuscript evidence for the genu- 
ineness of the Bible may in the years to come be pro- 
duced. This is an age of discovery, and valuable 
works may yet be unearthed, when we recollect 
that a century and a third ago (1750-60), in the 
a vat ions at Pompeii, books buried there in 79 
a. D. came forth to startle the world, and when we 
remember that the Sinaitic Manuscript, a parchment 
of the fourth century, was found less than thirty 
yean ago. Perhaps some of Paul's Epistles in the 
handwriting of Tertius, with a postscript by him- 
;", will yet appear. The apostle sent for his 
"books, especially the parchments/' but he may 
have never received them from Troas ; they may 
be lying buried now somewhere about that city, 



THE BIBLE IN MANUSCRIPT. 37 

where he left them with his friend Carpus. What 
if Schliemann, in his excavations at Troy or Troas, 
should find not Homeric relics, but PauPs books 
and parchments ? The future alone can disclose 
what Troas and other old cities may possess in the 
way of biblical manuscripts. Meanwhile let us be 
grateful for the parchments which a kind Providence 
has already brought down to us from antiquity. We 
have of the New Testament more than a thousand 
manuscripts, which prove it beyond a shadow of 
doubt to be genuine. We should cherish what has 
thus been divinely kept for our benefit through the 
ages. 

Perhaps we do not have for the Scriptures that 
intense love which the apostle had. How he longed 
to have by him his books and parchments ! Among 
these may have been some sacred volume given 
him, it may be, by an affectionate mother while a 
boy at Tarsus, or a gift from that married sister at 
Jerusalem whose son once saved his life from a 
Jewish mob. He may have carried it all through 
his eventful career, amid the perils on the sea, amid 
the perils among the robbers, in hunger and thirst, 
in cold and nakedness. Everywhere it had been 
his comfort, fortifying him for every emergency, 
and now that he was in a Roman dungeon, with 
the long nights of a dreary winter coming on, and 
with sure death from the monster Nero in the 
spring, he seems to have wanted again the old 
Bible, left with his other books and parchments 



38 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

at Troaa The volume would be doubly inter- 
esting from its associations if given hirn in the long 
ago, when, as Farrar has beautifully pictured him, 
u little dreaming of all that would befall him, he 
played, a happy boy, in the dear old Tarsian home." 
Have any of us such a treasure, a present to us in 
childhood, with a loved name written below ours on 
the fly-leaf? If we have, let us hunt it up, brush 
away the dust on its covers, and, as we recall the 
golden past, and as the tears start to our eyes be- 
cause of tender memories, let us open it and once 
more read prayerfully its warnings and encourage- 
ments. One thing is certain : when we come to 
face death as Paul did, we shall ask for the old 
book, and somehow it will be very dear then, not 
only because it was perhaps a gift of a mother or a 
sister gone to heaven, but because it will be a mes- 
sage of life from the glorified Saviour himself. 

" How precious is the book divine 
By inspiration given ! 
Bright as a lamp its doctrines shine, 
To guide our souls to heaven." 



CHAPTER III. 

THE BIBLE IN ENGLISH. 

"Every man heard them speaking in his own language." — 
Acts 2: 6. 

THE Old Testament, as all are aware, was 
written in Hebrew, and the New in Greek. 
But the divine plan has been to communicate the 
truth to each nationality in its own tongue. At 
Pentecost there were representatives from " every 
nation under heaven," and yet they heard the 
gospel, says the text, each " in his own language." 
What occurred then by miraculous power has been 
taking place ever since by the slower process of 
providential movements. The word of life is being 
given to every people in the vernacular. 

The Bible has been more generally translated 
than any other book, having been rendered, in part 
or as a whole, by the British Society into two hun- 
dred and seventy-nine tongues and dialects, and 
into more than eighty languages by the American 
Society. Away back to 280 b. c, when the Script- 
ures (confined then to the Old Testament) existed 
only in Hebrew, and when in consequence of Alex- 
ander's spread of Grecian civilization the Greek 

39 



40 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

language was largely used, it was felt that a trans- 
lation of the Bible into this tongue was necessary, 
and the result was the famous Septuagint Version, 
called Septuagint (meaning seventy) because that 
number of scholars was supposed, though improb- 
ably, to have wrought upon the work. 

When Grecian supremacy was succeeded by 
Soman, the Scriptures were needed in Latin, and 
accordingly as early as the second century of the 
Christian era there was a version in this tongue, 
which Jerome in the fourth century made the basis 
of what is termed the Vulgate (that is, common), 
because it was for common use, for ordinary readers 
who did not understand the original Hebrew and 
Greek. This translation was violently opposed at 
first (as all translations have been) on the ground 
of its being a kind of tampering with God's word, 
and on the ground of its tending to unsettle the 
faith of people. But in the course of years it won 
its way into popular favor. 

Then there were versions in Syriac, Ethiopic and 
in still other ancient languages, and these, being 
very old, are of great importance in proving the 
genuineness of the Bible. They show that the sa- 
cred writings have entered into the literature of all 
nations, and our religion is thereby given an historic 
foundation. 

The Bible in English is what we are at present 
specially to consider. Seligiously, our Saxon an- 
cestors were not very highly favored. They had to 



THE BIBLE IN ENGLISH. 41 

depend upon the clergy for most of their knowledge 
of the Bible, for there were only fragmentary trans- 
lations and paraphrases. Their language does not 
seem much like the present English. When they 
prayed, u Thy kingdom come," they said, "To 
cymeth ric thin." Their version of " and his food 
was locusts and wild honey " ran as follows : " and 
hys mete waes gaerstapan and wudu-hunig." 

1. Not till the time of Wycliffe was the whole 
Bible translated into English. His rendering of 
" Thy kingdom come " was " Thi kyngdom cumme 
to." He was strongly opposed by the ecclesiastics 
for presuming to give the Holy Book to the laity. 
They compared it to casting a pearl before swine, 
but he persevered till, with some assistance, he com- 
pleted his work in 1380, having made his trans- 
lation not from the original Hebrew and Greek, but 
from the Latin Vulgate. Copies of the volume 
were eagerly sought, although, it being before the 
invention of printing, a single manuscript copy sold 
for two hundred dollars of our money. For the 
merest fragment of a Gospel or an Epistle a whole 
load of hay would be exchanged. 

Wycliffe was sincerely hated by that priestly age, 
but he died a natural death in 1384. Not till 1415 
did the papal authorities see what an opportunity 
had been missed in not making him a martyr. In 
that year they did the next best thing. They dis- 
interred his bones, burnt them and committed the 
ashes to the river Swift to be borne out into the 



42 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

ocean. But, as has been said, those scattered ashes 
are emblematic of the wide diffusion of the Script- 
ures which Wycliffe translated. 

2. More than a hundred years later Tyndale 
proposed to have every plough-boy able to read 
the sacred word. He had to cross to the Continent 
to make his translation, because, to use his own 
expression, there was " no place to do it in all Eng- 
land." Even then his steps were dogged by the 
persecutor. He had to fly from city to city, go 
under an assumed name and labor in secret. By 
1526 he had the satisfaction of seeing the entire 
New Testament put through the press, for the art 
of printing was now known. English had by this 
time become nearly what it is at present, and we 
readily recognize this sentence, " Geve vs this daye 
oure dayly breade." The difference is mainly in 
the spelling. And, so far as that is concerned, our 
Authorized Version has been changed since 1611, 
when we find sin spelt s-i-nn-e, and truth, t-r-u-e-t-h. 
Aside from the spelling, Tyndale has largely given 
us our scriptural vocabulary, although some of his 
words have been changed, and so we say, for in- 
stance, dogs where he translated "whelppes." 
The meaning, of course, is the same with either 
rendering, and taste determines which is the pref- 
erable word. When the Bible is revised it is not 
changed as to its real substance, but only in the 
outer dress. The wording of Tyndale, however, 
has not been greatly altered. He was a fine lin- 



THE BIBLE IN ENGLISH. 43 

guist, and translating, as he did, from the original 
Hebrew and Greek, his work surpassed Wycliffe's 
in value. 

Copies were shipped to England, where every- 
thing was done to prevent their sale. Spies were 
on the watch and whole editions were bought up 
and committed to the flames by the authorities. 
But an extensive circulation could not be prevented, 
and there seemed to be no alternative except to cut 
off the source of supplies. Tyndale himself must 
be put out of the way, and accordingly he was 
arrested, having been betrayed by an Englishman 
who pretended to be his friend, and who had bor- 
rowed some money from him on the very morning 
of the betrayal. He was thrown into prison, 
whence he wrote a" letter beseeching the officer in 
charge to make him a little more comfortable. He 
pleaded, to quote his own words, for " a warmer 
cap, for I suffer extremely from a cold in the head ;" 
for a " warmer coat also, for that which I have is 
very thin ;" and for " a candle in the evening, for 
it is wearisome to sit alone in the dark." Thus did 
the noble Tyndale suffer that he might give even 
the plough-boys of England the word of God. 
Finally, in 1536 he was strangled, and his body 
was subsequently given to the flames. 

3. After Wycliffe and Tyndale, on the roll of 
honor and of biblical fame, comes Coverdale, who 
translated (mostly from Luther's German version 
and from the Latin Vulgate) the entire Scriptures 



44 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

in a single year (1535). Thus another version was 
put into circulation, with a different phraseology, 
which, for instance, made the dove of Noah's ark to 
carry the olive-branch, not in the mouth, but u in 
hir nebb." Public opinion had now begun to 
change, and Coverdale went so far as to dedicate 
his Bible to the king, the corrupt Henry the Eighth, 
who, in the excessive flattery to which that age was 
given, was likened to Moses, Hezekiah and other 
Old-Testament worthies. 

4. John Rogers (with the pseudonym of Matthew), 
the famous martyr, who had labored with Tyndale 
on the Continent in the work of translating the 
Bible, next prepared a version, which was about 
two-thirds that of Tyndale and one-third that of 
Coverdale. This was called Matthew's Bible, and 
was issued in 1537. So far had the authorities 
grown favorable that this received the king's " most 
gracious license." But Henry the Eighth was about 
as variable with regard to versions as he was with 
regard to his wives. 

5. Accordingly, in 1538 another version was be- 
gun under the superintendence of Coverdale at 
Paris, where the facilities for publishing were bet- 
ter than in London. No sooner was the new work 
under way at the French capital than the papal 
power interfered, and it had to be finished in Eng- 
land. Thus in 1539 the Great Bible (prepared 
chiefly from Matthew's) appeared — sometimes called 
Cranmer's, on account of a preface which he had in 



THE BIBLE IN ENGLISH. 45 

some editions, but more generally known as the 
Great Bible, because it was so very large. This 
was the royal favorite, although Henry before he 
died seems to have become prejudiced against hav- 
ing the Bible translated at all. He complained 
that it was becoming too common ; or, to use his 
own expression, he disliked to have it " disputed, 
rhymed, sung and jangled in every alehouse and 
tavern." It had become as popular as the Gospel 
Hymns of to-day. Before any positively backward 
movement was taken Henry died (1547), and under 
his successor, Edward the Sixth, during his six and 
a half years' reign, Bibles were multiplied. All 
the versions were sold, although Tyndale's seemed to 
take the lead. "So mightily grew the word of the 
Lord and prevailed." 

6. Then came a change. In 1553 "Bloody 
Mary" ascended the throne. During her reign 
of five years there were nearly four hundred mar- 
tyrs in England. Coverdale narrowly escaped ; 
Rogers (alias Matthew) was burned at the stake, 
where, says a contemporary (Foxe), he " waved his 
hand in the flame as though it had been cold water." 
Multitudes found safety in exile, and to Geneva 
many of these refugees repaired, and here sprung 
up another version, perhaps the most important of 
any yet, unless Tyndale's be an exception. Several 
distinguished scholars were engaged upon it, bring- 
ing it out in full in 1560. This Genevan Bible is 
sometimes called the " Breeches Bible," because it 



46 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

Bays our first parents made themselves not " aprons," 
but " breeches." This rendering, however, really 
originated with an earlier fragmentary translation, 
Caxtou's. 

The Genevan Version was dedicated to Queen 
Elizabeth, who had recently succeeded to the Eng- 
lish throne, and who was reminded in the preface 
that it was her duty to crush out the papacy, just as 
Josiah "burned" — such is the dedicatory language 
— " the idolatrous priests' bones upon their altars 
and put to death the false prophets." Those were 
times when it was worth while to be in the ascend- 
ancy, for the principle of toleration was unknown. 

The Genevan Version was the first to introduce 
the present verse arrangement, having borrowed the 
idea from the Greek text of Stephens, who made 
the minute divisions in 1551 during a horseback 
ride from Paris to Lyons. This version at once 
took high rank, and it really had superior merit. 
It seemed likely to crowd out even the Great Bible, 
which had been considered on the whole the best, 
especially in the higher circles of life. The Great 
Bible was the one used in the churches, but it was 
so very great, so large and unwieldy, it did not find 
its way into the home. Now, the Genevan, with 
its brief explanatory notes (very essential in those 
(lavs), seemed just adapted to family use. Its cir- 
culation accordingly increased more and more. The 
churchmen became alarmed, not liking the obvious 
opposition of its notes to episcopacy. 



THE BIBLE IN ENGLISH. 47 

7. Recognizing that they could never make the 
bulky Great Bible popular, they took steps to pre- 
pare another version, which was a revision of the 
Great, and which was published in 1568. This is 
sometimes called the "Treacle Bible," because of 
the translation (Jer. 8 : 22), " Is there no tryacle in 
Gilead?" where we have "balm;" but "triacle" 
also occurs in Coverdale (1535). The more common 
name is the " Bishops' Bible," because it was the 
work of several bishops, among whom parts were 
distributed. It gave us the word church, which 
before had generally been translated "congrega- 
tion." This was the version which had the eccle- 
siastical sanction, but Queen Elizabeth herself did 
not cast the royal influence decidedly in favor of 
any version, all the versions being allowed. It 
was enough that she took sides against the papists 
without antagonizing any wing of the Protestants. 

8. Elizabeth's persecution of the Roman Catho- 
lics resulted in their leaving the country in large 
numbers. Many of them took refuge at Rheims 
and Douay, and from these places came the Romish 
Bible — the New Testament in 1582 from Rheims, 
and the Old Testament in 1609 from Douay. The 
translators acknowledged that they did not approve 
of the Scriptures being rendered "in our mother 
tongue," but that they were forced into the ungrate- 
ful task because of what they termed the " impure 
versions " and " profane translations " of the Prot- 
estants. They translated from the Latin Vulgate, 



THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

which they rather singularly pronounced "better 
than the Greek text itself/ 1 although Greek was the 
original language of part of the Bible. This 
don renders "penance" for " repentance," and 
according to it "the hands of priesthood," and not 
• presbytery/ 1 were laid upon young Timothy 
in ordination. While there are these grave defects, 
the Catholic or Douay Bible has some more accurate 
renderings than the other versions, as where it is 
said that the lamps of the foolish virgins were going 
out, not gone out, as in our Authorized Version; 
and the New Revision has adopted this improve- 
ment. 

9. The next version was that of 1611, under 
King James. This was made to secure uniformity. 
Even under the preceding sovereign, Elizabeth, a 
bill was introduced " for reducing diversities of 
Bibles." It, however, was not carried through. 
Under James the feeling grew in favor of an 
"authorized" version. The king disliked all ex- 
isting translations, and particularly the Genevan 
(which was the most used), because of its indepen- 
dent notes, which savored, he said, a too much of 
traitorous conceits." One bishop objected to and 
more versions, on the ground that "if every man's 
humor should be followed, there would be no end 
of translating/' But he was overruled in his 
opinion, and soon forty-seven (fifty-four were at 
first named) of the ripest scholars of England were 
at work. Both the great universities, Oxford and 



THE BIBLE IN ENGLISH. 49 

Cambridge, were represented, as well as as both Pu- 
ritans and Churchmen, to whom respectively the 
Genevan and the Bishops' versions were very dear. 

The movement was begun in 1604, and the final 
result was reached in 1611, although the actual 
time spent was a little more than three years. 
Thus there came into being our so-called " Author- 
ized Version," combining the excellences of all the 
previous versions which the translators declared 
to be " sound for substance." Theirs was un- 
doubtedly an improvement upon any of the pre- 
ceding. It of course encountered opposition, and 
for some forty years the Genevan especially disputed 
the field with it, but it gradually gained ground 
till it displaced all others. 

But it was not perfect, and was not so considered 
from the outset. Under Cromwell another revision 
was seriously proposed, but the proposition came to 
nothing on account of the sudden dissolution of 
Parliament. 

10. After a lapse of two hundred and fifty years, 
however, it is not strange that modern scholarship 
entered upon the new revision in 1870, the best 
scholars of both England and America, without 
distinction of sect, co-operating. The result of 
their most careful labors through many more years 
than have ever been given to a similar work before 
is in our hands in the Revised Version, the New 
Testament appearing in 1881, and the Old in 1885. 
There are certainly many improvements. The same 



60 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

word when evidently used in the same sense is no 
longer translated by a dozen different, and some- 
times confusing, terms. Old manuscripts which 
have come to light since 1611 have enabled us to 
get what is more nearly the actual word of God. 
We have also secured more accurate, if not more 
euphonious, renderings. Poetical quotations are 
more impressive; the Psalms appear more what 
thev are — " songs of Zion" — when they are given, 
as they are, in their metrical form. For such and 
other reasons the Revised Version has been given a 
wide welcome. It is being largely introduced into 
our institutions of learning, and it is being used 
more and more in churches. Time alone can deter- 
mine whether, like other improved versions, it will 
eventually come into general favor, or whether it will 
be still further improved before it displaces the version 
which has been used for two centuries and a half. 

The fear, at first entertained, of the unsettling 
influence of a revision of the Bible has been 
dissipated by a growing intelligence. Faith is 
strengthened by the grand unity underlying the 
minor diversities of the various versions, and by 
the scholarly and painstaking endeavors in successive 
eenturies to get at the exact meaning of the words 
spoken of old in Hebrew and Greek by prophets 
and apostles. 

The Bible in English has a bright prospect when 
we consider with Gladstone " the future of English- 
speaking races." This statesman has recently es- 



THE BIBLE IN ENGLISH. 51 

timated those who will speak English in the year 
2000 at eight hundred and forty millions. He 
calculates that the United States alone by 1987 will 
have five hundred and fifty to five hundred and 
eighty milllions who will speak the language of 
Shakespeare. He thinks that a century hence those 
who speak English may outnumber those using all 
the other European tongues. This signifies a great 
deal as to the future of our English Bible. Already, 
says Dr. N. G. Clark, "the English language, 
saturated with Christian ideas, gathering up into 
itself the best thought of all the ages, is the great 
agent of Christian civilization throughout the 
world, at this moment affecting the destinies and 
moulding the character of half the human race." 
If an Anglo-Saxon minority is having such a 
mighty influence, what will not its coming majority 
accomplish ? The Bible in English is destined to 
dominate the world, to be largely instrumental in 
its conversion. Let us therefore treasure this book 
which has come down through the ages by being 
translated into new languages when the old have 
died ; which has sought and found the latest and 
very best expression when languages have been 
modified by time ; which has increasingly appeared 
in all the tongues of earth, elevating every nation 
where it has been read in the vernacular; and 
which has with special care been wrought into 
English, the tongue that most of all is to be used 
round the globe. 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE INSPIRATION OF THE BIBLE. 

u Kvery scripture inspired of God is also profitable for 
tea* thing, for reproof, for correction, for instruction which is in 
righteou8nea&"— 2 Tnr. 3: 16. 

THIS text gives us for a theme the Inspiration 
of the Bible. 
1. In the first place, what are some of the scrip- 
tural representations of this subject? The writers 
of the Old Testament are constantly saying, "Thus 
saith the Lord." David's words in one of the 
Psalms are quoted in Hebrews as the language of 
the Holy Ghost. Paul refers to the Spirit of God 
speaking by different prophets. Peter says that the 
prophets were "moved by the Holy Ghost." Nor 
did the apostles consider their own words as less 
authoritative. Paul tells the Corinthians that what 
he writes them is "the commandment of the Lord." 
He professes to speak "not in words which man's 
wisdom teacheth, but which the Spirit teacheth." 
In fact, all the apostles make the salvation of men 
dependent on faith in the doctrines which they 
preached. Still higher authority we find in the 
Saviour himself. As regards the Old Testament, 

52 



THE INSPIRATION OF THE BIBLE. 53 

he again and again refers to it to confirm even what 
he says; and as regards the New, when he com- 
missioned the disciples to teach he said, " It is not 
ye that speak, but the Spirit of your Father that 
speaketh in you." All Christians, then, can feel 
that in the Bible they have the word of God. 

2. To take a step in advance, Does the super- 
natural enter into the idea of inspiration ? It 
would seem that the writers of the Bible had more 
than ordinary spiritual illumination. They spoke 
with an authority more than human. No preacher 
at the present time can reasonably claim to be 
taught by direct revelation, nor can he call what he 
urges a " commandment of the Lord ;" and yet an 
apostle could and did do this. We never preface a 
remark with a genuine "Thus saith the Lord." 
We may possibly venture it with the sanction of 
Scripture, but never as intending to imply that we 
received the communication direct from Heaven. 
Our preaching has power only so far as we can say, 
Thus saith Scripture. The apostles and prophets 
could go back of the written word, and say with 
all the force that comes from a personal, face-to-face 
knowledge, " Thus saith the Lord." Here, there- 
fore, is a distinctive characteristic of a true inspira- 
tion. All God's people are inspired in a certain 
way, but divine authority is connected only with 
those who can utter words breathed from an inspira- 
tion which is supernatural. This test separates the 
Scriptures from all other writings. The authors of 



5 1 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

the Old Testament are either professedly God's 
spokesmen (and they sustain their claim by their life 
and work) or they are recognized as such by those 
whose divine inspiration is undoubted. The Old 
Testament as a whole is repeatedly appealed to by 
the Saviour even to give weight to his own God- 
spoken words. As to the New Testament, it was 
composed by those who had the promise of being 
led by the Spirit "into all the truth." Inspiration 
La thus more than the enlightenment common to be- 
lievers. For this reason the Epistles just after the 
apostolic age are excluded from the canon. One is 
impressed with the descent he has made when he 
compares Paul with Ignatius, and the apostolic 
writings in general with the earliest patristic liter- 
ature. It has well been said that the New Testa- 
ment " is not like a city of modern Europe, which 
subsides through suburban gardens and groves and 
mansions into the open country around, but like an 
Eastern city in the desert, from which the traveler 
passes by a single step into a barren waste." In the 
Bible alone we find the truth at first hand. Ordi- 
nary Christians get their knowledge at second hand. 
They have to search the Scriptures, they must use 
instrumentalities — instrumentalities furnished by 
holy men of old who talked with Jehovah himself, 
and so received the truth from God's own lips. 
Such is inspiration — not when the soul through 
provided avenues goes after God, but when the 
human spirit touches the great Spirit, feeling the 



THE INSPIRATION OF THE BIBLE. 55 

thrill of personal contact, inbreathing the pure truth 
till it is not Paul-inspired, but God-inspired. 

And while the faculties of the sacred writers 
seem sometimes to have been merely quickened and 
elevated as they related what they saw or what they 
learned through human testimony, they certainly 
had also an illumination of a higher kind than 
this; as Paul had when he received " revelations 
of the Lord," and when he solemnly declared of 
the gospel, " Neither did I receive it from man, nor 
was I taught it, but it came to me through revela- 
tion of Jesus Christ." God might grant this super- 
natural inspiration to men now as of old, so that the 
same weight should be attached to their words. 
This is possible, and yet as a matter of fact it seems 
not to be done. If one speaks with the authority 
of a Paul, we can pay him the same deference, 
provided that he shows the signs of an apostle. 
Let him work miracles, and then we may consider 
the propriety of enlarging the canon. We can 
test his apostolic claims, as we say with Luther, 
" Send him into the graveyard, and let him raise 
the dead." 

3. While inspiration is supernatural, it is not al- 
ways or mainly a process of dictation. Holy men 
spake as moved by the Spirit ; they were men, and 
not machines. Their faculties were not generally 
overpowered with the divine, so much as they 
were stimulated and exalted. Sometimes, indeed, 
one was so filled with the Spirit that he wrote in a 



THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

strain more or less mysterious to himself even, for 
we learn from the first chapter of the first letter of 
Petri- thai prophets searched into the meaning of 
their own utterances. Probably the orator in the 
fervor of address sweeps along with a grandeur and 
an eloquence surprising to himself in his cooler 
moments. This may partially account for Peter's 
statement that the prophets studied their own pre- 
dictions, but this explanation does not give the 
whole truth. We must distinguish between the 
inspiration of revelation and of elevation. The 
former is that of a man who did not know whether 
he was "in the body" or "out of the body" — a 
condition of things making somew T hat pertinent the 
familiar illustration of a musical instrument played 
upon and giving out unconsciously the harmonies 
of its masterful manipulator. But even the chief 
of the apostles intimated that this was an excep- 
tional experience, and he seemed desirous of being 
regarded as a man among men, with the common 
passions of humanity, yet so dominated by the 
Spirit as to be one of the Lord's authoritative 
teachers. "There are diversities of gifts," he said, 
" but the same Spirit," He recognized that indi- 
vidual peculiarities are preserved. Inspiration did 
not become merely mechanical, so as to destroy 
personality, but it used different persons in the way 
in which they were variously constituted mentally. 
We see this to be an actual fact with regard to 
biblical authors. The logical Paul shows his power 



THE INSPIRATION OF THE BIBLE. 57 

of reasoning in every sentence. The devotional 
John is more emotional and meditative in what he 
says. The matter-of-fact James writes plainly and 
practically. The Bible is a very natural as well 
as supernatural book. It is not a collection of 
rhythmical, stilted verses from the frenzied head 
of a Delphic priestess. It is the product of men 
speaking out from the fullness of sanctified per- 
sonalities. Individuality is not suppressed; it is 
stimulated, developed and glorified. The apostles 
were not mere pens in the hands of an overruling 
Spirit. They wrote according to their own natures, 
being, as the chief of them said, " men of like pas- 
sions" with the rest of mankind. Their inspira- 
tion was not automatic, but pervasive and en- 
ergizing. 

4. We are next led to inquire the extent of in- 
spiration. Is it plenary, extending to the words ? 
The fact seems to be that all the sacred writers were 
inspired, but in different degrees. The strictest 
inspirationist must admit that the eighth chapter 
of Romans has more of the spiritual element than 
the first chapter of Chronicles. The difference be- 
tween the Psalms and genealogical tables is appar- 
ent. Baxter considered portions of the Bible to be 
like the nails and hair as related to the human 
body. Nevertheless, we must regard even the com- 
monplace parts of the Scriptures as inspired, unless 
we consider inspiration a kind of fit. We can 
hardly suppose the apostle Paul to have been an 



58 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

ordinary mortal when he wrote his friendly saluta- 
tions to various persons named, and then suddenly 
to have become an entirely different being when he 
poured forth his living thoughts. Inspiration is 
nut a momentary assistance, when the Spirit wishes 
to be eloquent; it is a controlling force in all 
the life. The inspired penmen had within them 
a vital principle. They were not spasmodically 
seized by the Spirit to communicate some truth, 
and then released to follow their own pleasure. 
They were so possessed and penetrated by the spir- 
itual that everything they wrote had weight. If a 
great and good man should write us a letter, we 
would not reject as useless the superscription be- 
cause it might not have in it the fire of genius. The 
whole letter would be a treasure, though some parts 
might be better than others. We would not be 
disposed to run a pruning-knife through it and to 
throw aside the less important portions. We would 
not be so finical as that. Even so the whole Bible 
is inspired, though it may not be all equally 
precious, and we are not going to choose and reject 
its contents in accordance with any superfine critical 
spirit. The beauty of the Bible is that it treats of 
the historical. It shows the working of God in 
history. It is not a body of doctrine claiming to 
have been let down from heaven all cut and dried 
at a definite past period. It grew out of circum- 
stances fn.m time to time. It has to do with facts, 
with actual events, and with God manifest therein, 



THE INSPIRATION OF THE BIBLE. 59 

and hence it takes hold of us with all the force of 
tremendous reality. The oak, grand and strong, 
has insignificant outgrowths, but it is the same sap 
which courses through the trunk and through its 
smallest branches. The glorious old Bible may 
have comparatively unimportant parts, but it is the 
same spirit which gives life to the whole. 

In saying that inspiration extends to all the con- 
tents of Scripture are we committed to verbal in- 
spiration ? In a certain sense, yes. Words express 
thought, and it would be of little avail to maintain 
spiritual help in getting the truth, if the truth must, 
after all, be communicated in words bungling and 
inaccurate. As Van Oosterzee says : " If the true 
poetic spirit enables one to seize at once, and as by 
intuition, the exact and only suitable word for that 
which one desires to express, how much more shall 
the power of the Holy Spirit !" That is, if poetic 
inspiration is so felicitous in catching the precise 
word, divine inspiration cannot surely have less 
power of expression. 

5. One more question arises : Does the doctrine 
of inspiration, as has been set forth, exclude ab- 
solutely all errors from the Bible? Matthew, for 
instance, in citing an Old-Testament prophecy gives 
it from Jeremiah, whereas it is found in Zechariah. 
Apparently this, unless it is an error of transcribers, 
is a slip of memory. There are other alleged in- 
accuracies of a trifling nature, and, granting that 
the explanations offered are not altogether satis- 



THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

factory, oar faith need not be disturbed. The 
disciples were promised the Spirit to lead them 
into "all the truth/' and the truth indicated is 
spiritual truth, the truth of the gospel. The 
authority of a New-Testament writer in morals 
and religion can hardly be thought to be impaired 
by a possible failure to name the right author of a 
certain sentiment. An argument in favor of the 
equal rights of blacks and whites would not be 
invalidated by an illustration drawn from some 
slave's condition in Georgia, even though it might 
be discovered afterward that said slave had lived 
not in Georgia, but in Alabama. Any trivial in- 
accuracy (if such there be) on the part of the bibli- 
cal authors does not affect their reliability as regards 
the plan of salvation taught them by the Lord him- 
self or by direct revelation. 

So if it should be established that Old-Testament 
writers shared the false astronomical notions of their 
contemporaries, and that they even gave expression 
incidentally to a mistaken astronomy, they could still 
be infallible religious guides. Baronius long ago 
said with fine force, "Scripture is not given to 
make us acquainted with the course of heavenly 
ladies but with the way to heaven itself." In- 
spired Scripture is profitable, according to the text, 
for what ? To inform us upon Huxley's molecular 
changes? No. To give scientific explanation of 
the Oopernican system of the universe? No. To 
give a description of trilobites and brachiopods? 



THE INSPIRATION OF THE BIBLE. 61 

No. But " profitable for teaching, for reproof, for 
correction, for instruction which is in righteous- 
ness." It gives us a development theory, to be 
sure, but it is Christian development — how to grow 
in grace till the stature of perfect manhood in 
Christ Jesus is reached. The first chapter in Gen- 
esis is not meant to teach geology. The great 
thought there is not, In the beginning — proto- 
plasm, or " frog-spawn " as Carlyle said ; not, In 
the beginning — a fire-mist ; but back of all this, 
" In the beginning — God created the heaven and 
the earth." A geological error, if proved, need 
not unsettle our faith in the reliability of the Bible 
within the sphere of religion. A first-class doctor 
to whom we should be willing to entrust our lives 
might within the domain of the law make mistakes 
without any discredit to him as a physician. A 
pilot might be entirely safe in conducting us past 
danger in a rushing stream, even if he called the 
obstruction in the river-bed trap- rock when he 
should have said sand-stone. The Bible can be an 
unerring religious guide even though it might say 
Jeremiah when it should have said Zechariah, and 
though it might make some astronomical or geolog- 
ical or historical error. Yet alleged errors do not 
always turn out to be such. Nearly all, if not 
quite all, difficulties in the Bible have been satis- 
factorily explained or harmonized without admitting 
that there have been mistakes of any kind. And 
if there is still an occasional obstacle to entire faith, 



59 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

we may well wait for further light before positively 
pronouncing against the infallibility of the Bible 
along all lines. 

Take the case of the proper title of Sergius 
Paulus, the governor of the island of Cyprus. 
Luke, in the Acts, called him " proconsul," whereas, 
it used to be averred, he should have said "pro- 
protor," for Cyprus was an imperial and not a 
senatorial province. Both Strabo and Dion Cas- 
sius name Cyprus an imperial district, and its gov- 
ernor should therefore have been called proprietor, 
so formerly said those who would discredit Luke. 
Christians used to be troubled by the apparent in- 
accuracy of Luke in saying " proconsul," and the 
eminent Grotius reluctantly admitted, on the author- 
ity of the two pagan writers quoted, that the author 
of the Acts had fallen into an error. It was as if 
one should pretend to write the history of the pres- 
ent, and should speak of Mr. Cleveland as Senator 
instead of President. Of course, Christians were 
distressed, and they resorted to all sorts of ingenious 
explanations. But by and by in the same secular 
historian, Dion Cassius, it was discovered that while 
Augustus did hold Cyprus as an imperial province 
tor a while, he exchanged it for another district, 
and it thus became a senatorial province, and pro- 
con, a] became the proper title for its governor, and 
Luke, after all, was shown to be correct. To make 
the matter still surer, coins of the time have been 
found, and these call the rulers of Cyprus procon- 



THE INSPIRATION OF THE BIBLE. 63 

suls. Still further, General Cesnola in his recent 
excavations at Cyprus came upon a coin bearing 
the inscription, " in the proconsulship of Paulus," 
who may have been the very one named by Luke. 
So completely has been established even the histor- 
ical accuracy of the author of the Ads in speaking 
of the proconsul Sergius Paulus. More light may 
clear up other difficulties, and we should be slow to 
admit errors of any kind in God's word. We can 
afford to hang up present perplexities and to wait, 
while yet there is always that impregnable position, 
to which we can if necessary fall back, of the infal- 
libility of the Bible in all spiritual matters at 
least. 

We thus have in the Scriptures the word of God, 
supernaturally though not mechanically inspired, 
pervaded throughout by the Spirit, even to the 
words so far as these are essential to main ideas, 
while at the same time any possible minor mistakes 
on side issues need not weaken our faith in the 
trustworthiness of those whose grand theme is the 
gospel of Jesus Christ. 

There is a human and a divine element in 
inspiration. The exact relations of the two seem 
incapable of precise statement The question is one 
which is trying the minds of the present generation, 
and in the end the efforts may be no more satisfactory 
than have been the attempts to define the exact 
relations between the human and the divine in the 
God-man. We can be thankful for the human 



CI THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

elemenl in the Bible, as we are for the human 
nature united with the divine nature in Christ. It 
S point of contact. " In all points tempted like 
we arc, 1 ' "touched with the feeling of our 
infirmities." There we have the human in the 
Lord Jesus* It is similar with the inspired writers, 
who were men of like passions with us. They 
were not spiritual automatons, different from us in 
every particular. They had more of the divine 
rather than less of the human. They were men, 
hut men inspired, and, reading them, spirit touches 
spirit till we are all aglow, even as burned the 
hearts of the two disciples when to them were 
opened the Scriptures. 



CHAPTER V. 

THE BIBLE AND THE MIRACULOUS. 

" Believe me for the very works' sake." — John 14 : 11. 

CHRIST here appeals to the evidence of his 
miracles. Anciently, the fact of miracles seems 
not to have been questioned. Even the Pharisees 
did not dispute their occurrence. They only claimed 
that Christ performed them by being in league with 
Satan. But in modern times the miraculous is 
denied altogether. Nor is the disbelief confined to 
revilers — to such men as Paine and Voltaire, who 
attacked the Bible bitterly, who did not want it to 
be true because of their immoral lives. The un- 
belief has extended to persons of good character, to 
those who admire Christianity when stripped of 
the supernatural, to those who are honest in their 
investigations, who have fine ability, and whose 
scientific attainments, it may be, are of a high 
order. They say, as did Nicodemus in a different 
connection, "How can these things be?" They 
consider the miraculous as neither probable nor 
possible. 

1. First, as to the possibility of miracles. Renan 
gays, " The supernatural is impossible." Without 

5 65 



66 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

considering any miracles in detail, let us see in 
pal if they are incredible, for if they are the 
Bible, which deals so largely in them, must go to 
the wall. 

The rationalist explains them away. He says 
that ( hrist gave sight to the blind, not by a miracle, 
hut by his skill as an oculist. He did not really 
raise Lazarus from the dead, but he recovered him 
from a swoon. The trouble with this rationalizing 
is that sometimes the miracles are not so wonderful 
m the explanations. It taxes us more to believe 
the latter than the former. Paulus, for instance, at 
the beginning of this century said that Peter did 
not catch the fish with the piece of money in its 
mouth, but he caught a fish and sold it for the 
amount named. He read the record very carefully, 
" Go thou to the sea, and cast a hook, and take up 
the fish that first cometh up; and when thou hast 
opened his mouth — " There! said this rationalist, 
it is more natural to suppose not that Peter opened 
the fish's mouth and took out the money, but that 
In opened his own mouth, crying the fish for sale. 
The picture is more vivid than dignified as we 
imagine the apostle, in accordance with this concep- 
tion, walking the streets of Capernaum and calling, 
kk \ ice fresh fish ! just caught from the lake !" The 
Story, taken literally, is a great deal more credible 
than any such fantastic explanation. Miracles are 
not so difficult that we have to resort to any such 
make-hilts of interpretation. 



THE BIBLE AND THE MIRACULOUS. 67 

The possibility of miracles has sometimes been 
illustrated in this way — that they are the result of 
natural laws unknown to all but the miracle- worker. 
This is the theory : God so formed the universe in 
the very beginning that it should at intervals pro- 
duce miracles. The common illustration is that of a 
machine made to turn out square numbers millions 
of times, while after that it gives forth a cube, and 
then only squares till the machine wears out. There 
are two ways of accounting for the solitary cube 
number : the maker of the machine may have 
directly interfered at the moment, or he may have 
provided for the change in the original construction 
of his fine piece of mechanism. Thus it is with 
God's machine, the universe, which generally pro- 
duces ordinary events, but which once in a while 
gives forth the miraculous. How is it done ? Why, 
by no immediate interference of God ; the whole 
thing was planned by him from the very outset. A 
hidden spring was made to act at long intervals, 
and if we could see this spring miracles would 
seem perfectly natural. 

We may illustrate in another way: We may 
suppose little creatures which live for only two or 
three hours standing before a clock. There is a 
tradition among them that the clock once rang out 
a terrible alarm, startling all that heard. But all 
of them now alive never heard anything except a 
tick ! tick ! tick ! or perhaps the striking of the 
hour. Some of them do not believe that there 



68 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

ever was an alarm. Fellow-insects have come and 
and have heard nothing of the sort. Mean- 
while the dock runs on until it comes to the point 
for which the alarm was set, and all at once there 
is a whir and a clatter and a racket, such as has 
not been heard for several generations, and little 
unbelievers are convinced of what through their 
ignorance they had doubted. So we stand before 
God's greal clock denying that there ever was the 
miraculous. And yet it is not incredible that there 
was a secret spring made to ring out an alarm at 
certain periods — that there came after a long lapse 
of time the miraculous to arrest the attention of 
mankind and to wake them up to the higher ends 
of human existence. 

A more poetic illustration is furnished by the 
century-plant. The first year it has no blossom, 
nor has it the second year, nor the third, nor the 
twentieth, nor the seventieth; and then the owner 
dies. His son keeps the plant. He is asked if it 
ever blooms. " Oh no !" he replies, " that is not its 
nature." The eightieth year comes, the ninetieth, 
the hundredth, and lo, it blossoms ! The credulous 
mind might consider it a miracle in the strictest 
hat is, something supernaturally produced 
mi the Bpot But the botanist knows that the plant 
blooms once a century from natural causes. In like 
manner, the course of history runs for a hundred 
re, two hundred, five hundred, and at the end of 
a millennium there is an age of miracles. But 



THE BIBLE AND THE MIRACULOUS. 69 

there is nothing incredibly miraculous ; in the nat- 
ural order of events the time has come for the blos- 
som — that is all. The world is made to bloom for 
a while in accordance with the eternal purpose of 
God. 

The hidden-law theory, thus variously illus- 
trated, at least serves to show that miracles are not 
absolutely impossible on account of the apparent 
fixity of natural laws ; for we do not know what 
all these laws are or what provision may have been 
made for rising emergencies. But the Church in 
general does not hold to so mechanical a view of 
the world as has just been indicated. It is not 
necessary to maintain that the universe was so con- 
stituted as to produce the miraculous at certain 
prearranged epochs. 

It is easier for most men to believe that God pro- 
duces the miracles at the time by a direct act of power. 
Why should he not be able to do this ? Why should 
he not be able to counteract natural law ? It is being 
done constantly — not in a way to be termed miracu- 
lous, because it is an every-day occurrence, but in a 
way which illustrates the miraculous. The chemi- 
cal law of decay is suspended by the preservative 
law of salt. The law of gravity draws the stone 
to the earth, but you counteract that law when you 
lift it from the ground and hurl it into the air. 
There is no violation of law in such instances, but 
only a suspension. The watchmaker can prevent 
the wheels of a watch from running, but let him 



70 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

n hifl hold upon the delicate machinery and it 
runs again all right Why cannot God similarly 

interfere in his works, suspending or counteracting 
natural laws at will? He can, and when he does 
a miracle is the result. Dr. A. T. Pierson uses 
this figure: " I have a watch here; when wound 
up it runs straight forward until it needs rewind- 
in- '. . . . Yet when I find it is too fast I move the 
hands backward — I interrupt the usual movement, 
hut I violate no law. The watch could not have 
turned hack its own hands and corrected itself, but 
a superior intelligence interferes for a proper end. 
... As I examine more minutely into the structure 
of this delicate piece of mechanism, I observe a 
remarkable fact: the maker of this watch has 
made provision for just such a reversal of that law 
by which both minute- and hour-hands move only 
forward. He has provided for a backward move- 
ment when the intelligent owner chooses." 

So that miracles are possible to Omnipotence, 
either through the operation of a higher law of 
which we at present are ignorant, or, more likely, 
through the suspension and balancing and manip- 
ulation of laws already known, but not known in 
all their wonderful power of combination to pro- 
duce results. Twenty years ago it would have 
Beemed a miracle for the human voice to be heard 
at a distance of fifty or a hundred miles. But 
there has oome such a knowledge of the laws of 
electricity and sound that by the telephone there can 



THE BIBLE AND THE MIRACULOUS. 71 

be vocal communication at ranges of distance once 
deemed impossible. Who, then, will limit the 
Omnipotent and Omniscient, and say that God can- 
not by his perfect understanding of natural laws and 
by his almighty power work miracles ?" " Since, 
says the geologist Dawson, " science itself enables 
men to work miracles absolutely impossible and 
unintelligible to the ignorant, we may readily be- 
lieve that the Almighty can still more profoundly 
modify and rearrange his own laws and forces. 
Viewed in this way," adds this eminent scientist, 
" a miracle is a most natural thing, and to be ex- 
pected in any case where events great and moment- 
ous in a spiritual sense are transpiring." Gladstone 
in his review of Robert Elsmere has given expres- 
sion to a similar thought. " There is," he says, 
"an extraneous force of will which acts upon mat- 
ter in derogation of laws purely physical, or alters 
the balance of those law's among themselves. It 
can be neither philosophical nor scientific to pro- 
claim the impossibility of a miracle until philoso- 
phy or science shall have determined a limit beyond 
which this extraneous force of will, so familiar to 
our experience, cannot act upon or deflect the nat- 
ural order." Even Huxley, though declaring that 
supernatural Christianity is " doomed to fall," says, 
" Xo one is entitled to say a priori that any given 
so-called miraculous event is impossible." That is 
a recent admission of his ; so that the possibility of 
miracles would seem to be beyond controversy. 



7 2 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

2, We come thus, in the second place, to the 
probability of miracles. This Huxley denies on 
the g round of insufficient evidence. We have all 
read Hume's famous argument, which may be stated 
as follows : On the one side there is the evidence of 
certain witnesses; on the other is the testimony of 
universal experience which declares the laws of na- 
ture to be unalterable. Those who witness to the 
miraculous having taken place are few as compared 
with the multitudes who testify to the unbroken 
succession of natural laws. So that it is a question 
of probabilities — it is a hundred or a thousand or 
ral thousand saying they have seen supernatural 
events, while millions upon millions have seen, and 
so will admit, only natural events. It is more 
probable that the few should be wrong than the 
many. Such is the position taken, but it cannot 
be sustained. If ten worthy persons passing along 
the street should say that they saw a certain picture 
in a store- window, and a hundred others should 
unite in saying that they did not notice it, and 
therefore that it could not be there, we would be- 
lieve the ten rather than the hundred. 

To use a familiar illustration: Suppose a people 
living in the tropics never to have heard of ice, but 
a half dozen of them, good, reliable men, take pas- 
northward. Returning, they tell their fellow- 
countrymen that water sometimes becomes solid, so 
that it can be walked upon. Improbable enough, 
those tropical people might say ; it is against nature. 



THE BIBLE AND THE MIRACULOUS. 73 

Thus the ignorant natives would all be arrayed 
against the six travelers, and could claim a prepon- 
derance of witnesses, but they would be wrong just 
the same. What if for eighteen centuries no mira- 
cle has been seen by any who have inhabited this 
earth ? That weighs as nothing against five hun- 
dred who did witness miracles in the first century 
of the Christian era. 

The miraculous would seem to be probable, in- 
stead of improbable, when we think of the ends to 
be gained. There have been in the course of human 
history occasions apparently at least requiring divine 
intervention. Horace, the old Roman poet, had the 
correct idea when he said, " Let not a god intervene 
unless there be a knot worth his untying." Well, 
there have been just such emergencies. 

In Old-Testament times the great endeavor was 
to establish the true doctrine of one personal God. 
The tendency was to deify the forces of nature, giv- 
ing gods innumerable. How could this polytheism 
be overcome by monotheism? How could people 
be made to believe in a God over and above nature, 
rather than in numerous deities identical with na- 
ture in its various aspects ? We have no apprecia- 
tion of the great issue involved. The prevailing 
religions were polytheistic. The whole atmosphere 
was unfavorable to the truth of one personal God. 
The divine One had, so to speak, to manifest him- 
self : he could not have gotten the attention without 
miracles. Not that he performed them every day. 



7 1 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

There are hundreds of years at a time devoid of the 
miraculous. We forget that Bible history is frag- 
nentary, oontaining only the striking epochs. Even 
in the scriptural history which we have, while there 
are miracles scattered along here and there, they 

mded only at two critical periods under the old 
dispensation : in the time of Moses, when the new 
religion was to be established, and in the time of 
Elijah, when it seemed likely to go down before 
idolatry. God came in with the miraculous at 
both these periods, because they were great crises 
when the true religion needed special nourishing. 
When we reflect upon what was at stake, when we 
remember it was then being determined whether 
we to-day should be worshiping the God of heaven 
or bowing down to stocks and stones, we can see 
the reasonableness of the divine intervention. 

The advent of Christ in the new dispensation 
was another great epoch. When we learn of the 
almost universal skepticism that existed nineteen 
centuries ago, the old faiths everywhere crumbling, 
and when we read of the shocking immoralities that 
were practiced, not secretly, but openly, not in the 
dams of society, but in the very temples of worship, 
— when we have knowledge of all this, and then re- 
member that a single individual who was cradled in 
a manger, and who as he grew up worked at the car- 
penter^ trade,— when we recollect that this one Per- 

i >f humble birth and training was to revolutionize 
the world, we can understand why the miraculous 



THE BIBLE AND THE MIRACULOUS. 75 

should be used. It is what we should expect, and 
never could Christianity have become the mighty 
power that it is had there not been the supernatural 
to give it impetus in the beginning. If there were 
not miracles to aid in its establishment, a miracle is 
required to explain its widening influence down 
the ages, until now nothing else can be compared 
with it in grandeur of onward movement as it 
sweeps in triumph round the globe. The gifted 
author of Christianity and Science, Dr. A. P. Pea- 
body, writes eloquently of this advance without 
retrogression since the first century. " What do we 
see since that age ?" he asks ; and then answers, 
" Progress, but no decline. Dawn, sunrise, high 
morning, but no receding of the shadow on the sun- 
dial. Barbaric irruptions that fertilize when they 
threaten to destroy. Dark ages, like those dreary 
spring-days whose drenching rains are the harbinger 
of all that is gladdening in garden, field and orchard 
— ages during which humane principles are taking 
root, institutions and habits of charity and mercy 
springing into being, slavery melting away and 
vanishing. There has not been since the Christian 
era a century than which we can say that the pre- 
ceding century was better. . . . When we see that 
belief in such a religion, in such a Saviour, though 
mingled with puerilities, superstitions and absurdi- 
ties, has proved the mightiest force in the moral 
universe, alone not yielding to the law of decline 
and exhaustion to which all other forces have sue- 



7,; TEE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

combed, it becomes in the highest degree probable 
that mankind Deeded such a religion, such a Sav- 
iour; and if BO the miracles that attended its pro- 
mulgation and his mission were in themselves aute- 

ntly probable/' 

The miraculous, then, is even probable, both in 
the old and in the new dispensation, when we recol- 
lect that it was a life-and-death struggle between 
monotheism and polytheism — between a personal 
God and deified nature, and when we recollect that 
it was a contest between a pure Christianity and an 
immoral skepticism, and when we see the victory 
attained in both these great conflicts. 

Bat when the truth was thoroughly established 
in each case, it was left to a natural development 
and the miraculous was withdrawn. Chrysostom 
of the fourth century (the "golden-mouthed," as 
he was called) expresses this beautifully when he 
says: " As ... a husbandman, having lately com- 
mitted a young tree to the bosom of the earth, 
counts it worthy, being yet tender, of much atten- 
tion, on every side fencing it round, protecting it 
with stones and thorns, so that it neither maybe 
tom up by the winds, nor harmed by the cattle, nor 
injured by any other injury; but when he sees that 
it is fast-rooted and has sprung up on high, he 
take- away the defences, since now the tree can 
defend itself from any such wrong; thus has it 
ti in the matter of our faith. When it was 
dewly planted, while it was yet tender, great atten- 



THE BIBLE AND TEE MIRACULOUS. 77 

tion was bestowed on it on every side. But after 
it was fixed and rooted and sprung up on high, 
after it had filled all the world, Christ . . . took 
away the defences." In other words, the miracu- 
lous no longer hedged it round. Let us be grateful 
that the precious gospel was thus nurtured. It was 
planted, the Saviour said, the least of all seeds, but, 
to paraphrase from one of the Psalms, it has taken 
deep root and filled all lands. The hills are cov- 
ered with the shadow of it, and the boughs thereof 
are like goodly cedars, stretching from sea to sea. 
Verily, this cannot be the product of natural devel- 
opment alone. The miraculous is needed to explain 
the marvelous growth. 

In conclusion, He who said, " Believe me for 
the very works' sake," is the One to whom are to 
be ascribed the works of creation, and these surely 
witness to miraculous power. "All things were 
made by him," says John. He therefore spoke into 
being our solar system, with its central sun and 
circling planets and revolving moons. He called 
into existence each of those more than one hundred 
thousand suns, like ours centres around which 
wheel other planetary bodies with their bright 
satellites. He created Alcyone, which equals twelve 
thousand luminaries like our orb of day, and from 
which, in the immensity of nature, it takes light, 
flying nearly two hundred thousand miles a second, 
seven hundred years to reach this earth. He flung 
forth into boundless space that whole " sphere of 



78 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

stars whose diameter/ 1 we read, "is seven millions 
(»{" yean ftfl light travels." He swung into their 
orbits tht' colored suns, those blazing constel- 
lations with all the beautiful tints of the rain- 
how. Notwithstanding this marvelous manifesta- 
tion through the visible of "his everlasting power 
and divinity," we, creatures of the dust and of a 
day, stand up and debate whether he can work a 
miracle, whether he can control what he has made 
with his own hands. May the wonderful works of 
creation lead us to believe in the miraculous works 
of the Lord of glory ! and may the latter make us 
believe in Him himself who built the skies ! Then 
when we come to die there will be no volume like 
that which has taught us these things, and there 
will be no chapter like that which contains our 
text and which contains the revelation of the heav- 
enly mansions. Our feeling at the dying hour will 
be that of Sir Walter Scott, who, as he neared his 
end, asked Lockhart to read to him, and when the 
latter inquired, "Out of what book?" the reply 
was, kt Need you ask? there is but one;" and there- 
upon the Bible was brought, and the chapter read 
and listened to with delight was this fourteenth of 
John, which says, "In my Father's house are many 
mansions," and which says, "Believe me for the 
very works' sake." 



CHAPTER VI. 

FORMIDABLE OBJECTIONS TO THE BIBLE. 

" Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth ? 
Declare, if thou hast understanding. 

* * * * * * 

Doubtless, thou knowest, for thou wast then born, 
And the number of thy days is great!" — Job 38 : 4, 21. 

"l^TOT infrequently there is a person who chal- 
■*-* lenges *the truthfulness of God's word, who 
questions some of the more marvelous things rela- 
ted in the Scriptures. We will frankly consider cer- 
tain of the more formidable objections to the Bible, 
and by seeing the light which can be thrown even 
upon these, perhaps we will have our faith sufficient- 
ly strengthened not to stumble at every apparent 
obstacle, or at least we will have learned not to 
accept the dictum of the infidel who thinks he 
knows more of the history of the past than the men 
who lived therein. He has not the least hesitation 
in denying the occurrence of events which the Bible 
vouches for through living witnesses of the time. 
He is perfectly sure the scriptural narrative does 
not correspond to the actual facts. Every once 
in a while he gets tripped up ; still, he keeps on 

79 



80 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

impugning the statements of the sacred historians. 
A little of the modesty inculcated by our text 
would be to the advantage of the supercilious 
unbeliever: 

" Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth ? 
I declare, if thou hast understanding. 

* * * * * * 

Doubtless, thou knowest, for thou wast then born, 
And the number of thy days is great!" 

1. The most brilliant infidel of the day describes 
the Holy Land as " one-fifth the size of Illinois — 
a frightful country, covered with rocks and desola- 
tion. There never was an agent in Chicago that 
would not have blushed with shame to have de- 
scribed that land as flowing with milk and honey." 
Was, then, the description thus given in Exodus 
of Palestine overdrawn ? The expression, of course, 
was a poetic one to indicate great fruitfulness. The 
Roman poet Ovid, who died during the lifetime of 
Christ, has a similar idea when he writes thus of 
the Golden Age: 

u Here rivers of milk, there rivers of nectar, were flowing, 
And from the green of the oaks the yellow honey was 
dropping." 

Bat the trouble is, that the Holy Land is singularly 
barren, stony and unproductive. That is, however, 
no evidence that it has always been so. For one 
thing, the timber has been all cut down, and the 
bad results of that we of modern times know. 



FORMIDABLE OBJECTIONS. 81 

Indeed, governments are now offering premiums for 
the planting of trees, and New York is discussing 
the necessity of preserving the vast forests of the 
Adirondacks if the Empire State is not to lose its 
fertility. Thus the present sterility of Palestine 
can be accounted for; the trees are largely gone. 
Besides, there are on the hillsides ruins showing 
that anciently terraces were made use of for the 
better cultivation of the land. That theory, says 
the objector, may be plausible enough, and may be 
correct, but is there any absolute proof that the 
soil was once productive? Yes, the Bible. But 
its statements are denied, although why this should 
be is not exactly clear. Why will some admit at 
once the truth of what pagans write ? Are they so 
much more trustworthy than holy men of old ? 

But since our infidels prefer other than scriptural 
authorities, they shall be satisfied. Tacitus, of the 
end of the first and of the beginning of the second 
century, says expressly of Palestine : " The soil is 
rich." Josephus, a contemporary of the apostles 
says of Galilee that the "soil is universally rich 
and fruitful. . . . Moreover, the cities lie here very 
thick, and the very many villages there are here 
are everywhere so full of people, by the richness of 
their soil, that the very least of them contain above 
fifteen thousand inhabitants. ... It supplies men 
with the principal fruits, with grapes and figs con- 
tinually, during ten months of the year." A 
Chicago land-agent would not need to blush much 



THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

over such a possession. Nay, he could put up his 
posters that it does actually flow with milk and 
honey, for Josephus goes on to observe of Judaea 
and Samaria: "By reason also of the excellent 
a they have, their cattle yield more milk than 
do those in other places." Then if that agent could 
have only controlled the land in the vicinity of 
Jericho, he could have advertised, on the authority 
of Josephos, that "it will not be easy to light on 
any climate in the habitable earth that can well be 
compared to it ;" while he could have also quoted 
from the Jewish writer : " This country withal 
produces honey from bees." Milk and honey! 
Yet our smooth-tongued infidel, who knows more 
of the past than the people who lived then, 
says, " There never was an agent in Chicago that 
would not have blushed with shame to have de- 
scribed that land as flowing with milk and honey." 
This is only a sample of the way in which historical 
facts are set aside by the superficial and unscholarly 
infidelity which is making so much noise through 
the press and from the platform. Even if the 
Bible cannot always be immediately verified by 
secular authorities, that is no reason why we should 
pronounce it false. We do not know everything ; 
our age is not so great that we have personal 
knowledge of centuries ago; we were not then 
born. 

2. There is in Old-Testament history a second 
more serious difficulty, and that is the standing still 



FORMIDABLE OBJECTIONS. 83 

of the sun and moon at the command of Joshua to 
give him time to complete his victory. With our 
lack of knowledge we cannot declare this to be im- 
possible. We were not there and cannot speak with 
authority. It may be that the language is figura- 
tive. We speak of the sun rising and setting, 
though it does neither. Or perhaps the words in 
Joshua are a poetic way of saying that it was a 
good day's work ; what ordinarily would have re- 
quired two days was accomplished in one by the 
help of Jehovah, who lengthened the day in results 
if not literally. This interpretation receives some 
sanction when we come to read the sacred record, 
and find that the words which give us trouble are 
a poetical quotation from what is termed " the book 
of Jasher." Joshua prayed for time thoroughly 
to conquer the enemy, and so favorable were the 
accompanying circumstances that the victory was 
complete before the sun went down. If now a 
poet, Jasher, chose to represent the sun as stand- 
ing still, it was a beautiful thought, and naturally 
would be incorporated into the historical account 
of the battle. Homer makes Agamemnon to pray 
to Jove : 

" Let not the sun go down and night come on 
Ere I shall lay the halls of Priam waste." 

That was poetry, which meant that he wanted 
victory that day. This is one explanation which 
really does away with the miracle, but most hold 



84 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

that there was a miraculous lengthening of the day 
tor Joshua. It is not, however, very generally 
thought that the earth stopped in its revolution. 
It* it did, the way in which the phenomenon would 
be described would be that the sun stood still, and 
not that the earth halted in its revolving, for we 
Bay the sun rises and sets, although strictly we 
ought to say the earth rolls round into the light 
and out of it again, making day and night. There 
is no difficulty, therefore, in the fact that the sun 
was said to stand still (it was using language 
popularly, just as we do), but the difficulty is, How 
could the earth have been arrested in its diurnal 
motion without throwing us all off its surface, and 
without a shock to the whole solar system? Of 
course infinite Power could hold everything in its 
place, and could prevent any catastrophe, but it is 
more natural to suppose that the desired end was 
accomplished by less violent means. We are all 
acquainted with the laws of refraction. In the 
mirage, for instance, distant scenes ordinarily out 
of sight are lifted into view. How ? There is a 
modification of the atmosphere, and the rays of 
light are so bent as to fall upon our vision even 
over an intervening obstacle. This is not theory, 
but an atmospherical fact which has been repeatedly 
observed. Now, what if the sun did actually set 
wheu Joshua was fighting his battle? The air may 
have been so changed that the rays were refracted 
over the hills between, so that the sun would seem 



FORMIDABLE OBJECTIONS. 85 

to be in the open sky. In that way could the day 
be lengthened. That there was such a day seems 
the more probable when we are told that there is a 
Chinese tradition of a day double the usual length. 
Then there is the familiar Greek fable, that the 
sun was once persuaded by a rash boy of his to let 
him drive the flaming chariot across the heavens, 
and the result was that the youth was run away 
with, and the fiery steeds rushed up and down the 
skies, not reaching the western gates till long after 
the usual time. That seems to be the mythological 
way of stating that there has been one day when 
the sun was later than usual in setting. Who, 
therefore, shall assert that the sun did not to all 
intents and purposes stand still for Joshua? We 
were not there, we were not born over three millen- 
niums ago, and in our ignorance we will show some 
wisdom by not denying what both tradition and 
Scripture declare. At any rate, the strange phenom- 
enon is capable of a poetical and even scientific 
explanation. 

3. In passing let me merely allude to the much- 
discredited story of Jonah. Possibly, the narrative, 
if fictitious, could be used for the moral instruction 
conveyed by it in the Bible, for the Lord himself 
taught by parables, by stories ; but we can scarcely 
resist the conviction that Christ refers to the ex- 
perience of the prophet of Nineveh as historical, 
for Jonah and Solomon and the queen of the south 
are spoken of together. Besides, the great Teacher 



86 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

makes Qie entombment in the sea-monster typical 
erf his own three days spent in the grave; and the 
parallel is not very exact or impressive if both are 
not facts. We believe in the Lord's burial and res- 
urrection, and this is the greater miracle of the 
two. Nor is the lesser miracle, to my mind, so very 
incredible. There are marine animals large enough 
to -wallow a man. In the capacious stomach of a 
dog-fish a horse has been found whole, and likewise 
a warrior in full armor. These are not fictions. 
It is an authenticated case, that of the sailor who 
in 1758 was swallowed without mutilation by a 
leviathan of the deep. The only thing miraculous 
about the scriptural story is the preservation of the 
prophet alive under the circumstances. And why 
should this be regarded a thing incredible with 
God, who in the works of creation and in other 
recorded miracles that are generally accepted per- 
forms still greater wonders ? If you impeach the 
testimony of God's word as to the sign of the 
prophet Jonah, there must at least be admitted the 
ironical truthfulness of the scriptural representation 
of such as you : 

" Doubtless, thou knowest, for thou wast then born, 
And the number of thy days is great I" 

4. One more difficulty, and that is in relation to 
the Flood. There is the witticism about the venti- 
lation of the ark with its one little window ; but a 
scholar would never have made the egregious 



FORMIDABLE OBJECTIONS. 87 

blunder of supposing that there was only one small 
aperture for the admission of light and air. The 
Hebrew word implies that there was a system of 
windows, running, it would seem, just beneath the 
roof, the whole length of the ark, and when Noah 
opened the window for the raven and dove, a dif- 
ferent word is used (as the Revised Version, though 
not the old, indicates), showing that this was a sin- 
gle compartment in the larger window or " light." 
Nor is the objection that the ark was not large enough 
for all the different animals of any force, when we 
understand that it is not necessary to suppose there 
was a universal deluge. To be sure, we read of 
"all flesh" being destroyed, of the waters covering 
" all the high mountains that were under the whole 
heaven," but we also read of a decree going out 
from Csesar Augustus " that all the world should 
be enrolled" in the census of the first century. 
As the latter means simply the Roman empire, all 
the world in which Augustus had any interest, so 
the former may mean the world so far as Noah was 
concerned. Such general expressions need not be 
taken literally, any more than we are when we say, 
" Everybody is going to such and such a place." 
The ark, which was a little larger than the Great 
Eastern, may not have been capable of holding two 
of every species around the entire globe, but all the 
animals (two and two of them) of the land which 
we may suppose to have been swept by a partial 
flood may have had sufficient room. But is there 



THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

anv evidence (outside of the Bible) of even a local 
flood of* anv great extent? Yes; almost all nations 
have traditions of a destructive deluge. As the 
descendants of Noah multiplied and were dispersed 
over the earth, the memory of the great catastrophe 
would naturally be passed down the ages, although, 
of course, variations would arise. There is, accord- 
ingly the account of Berosus, in many respects 
resembling the scriptural narrative. The Chinese 
have a story that all the world was once drowned 
except three emperors. The Greeks had their Deu- 
calion, who built a ship in which he and his wife 
were saved from an inundation which destroyed all 
the rest of mankind. Among the American Indians 
are various traditions, one of which makes it the 
humming-bird that returns with a twig in its beak. 
Now, all this proves that there must have been some 
original fact which gave rise to the different stories. 
Nor is the deluge an unlikely event, looking at it 
from a geological standpoint. Only as long ago as 
"June, 1819," says the geologist Lyell, "the sea 
flowed in by the eastern mouth of the Indus, and 
in a few hours converted a tract of land two thou- 
sand square miles in area into an inland sea." We 
are familiar with geological elevations and depres- 
sions of land. Winchell, in his Sketches of Creation, 
Bays that "in 1822 the entire coast of Chili was 
elevated to a height varying from two to seven feet 
— an extent equal to the area of New England and 
New York having been lifted up bodily." The 



FORMIDABLE OBJECTIONS. 89 

same geologist declares that "a depression in the 
valley of the Lower Mississippi of only three hun- 
dred feet would admit the waters of the Gulf of 
Mexico up to the mouth of the Ohio." When 
Dawson, even from the scientific standpoint, tells us 
of geological deluges submerging the plains of 
Europe under one thousand feet of water, and 
informs us that the earth since the advent of man 
has taken at least one such "plunge-bath before 
attaining its modern fixity," we need not be very 
skeptical about a Bible flood, partial or universal ; 
we need not in the least discredit that of the time 
of Noah. God very properly says, 

"Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? 
Declare, if thou hast understanding. 

****** 
Doubtless, thou knowest, for thou wast then born, 
And the number of thy days is great !" 

We were not present when the great deep in the 
time of Noah is said to have been broken up, and 
we have no right to deny what is written as fact, 
what is sustained by universal tradition and what 
is rendered probable by geologic science. 

In conclusion, whether we believe in the deluge 
or not, there is coming the flood of death which 
will be to each of us a terrible reality. There is no 
getting around the waters of that Jordan, and un- 
happy shall we be if this mighty tide sweep us out 
into eternity while we are scoffing. We will then 



90 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

wish to be in one ark, and that is the ark of salva- 
tion. Seek safety in time, for there is such a thing 
bag too late. 

" Come to the ark, ere yet the flood 
Your lingering steps oppose; 
Come, for the door which open stood 
Is now about to close." 



CHAPTER VII. 

INCIDENTAL CONFIRMATIONS OF THE BIBLE. 

" Behold, the ships also, though they are so great, and are 
driven by rough winds, are yet turned about by a very 
small rudder, whither the impulse of the steersman willeth." 
— James 3 : 4. 

THE apostle is arguing against setting up to be 
" teachers " of divine things. He implies that 
special qualifications are required for the respon- 
sible position of making known the will of God. 
Self-constituted teachers are sure to make mistakes 
from which the inspired are free. " If any man," 
says the context, " stumbleth not in word, the same 
is a perfect man." " The tongue," James says, " is 
a little member," but it can easily make a slip. 
The truth of this we recognize in the oft-used Latin 
phrase, lapsus linguce, a slip of the tongue. Now, 
the teachers whom God inspired to give us a perfect 
rule of faith and practice, to give us the Scriptures, 
have not stumbled even in word. A slight inac- 
curacy, a slip of the tongue as to any essential fact, 
would be an impeachment of the veracity of the 
Bible, but such we do not find. If we did, it 
would throw the Old and New Testaments out of 

91 



92 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

the course of the divinely given, and would leave 
DA all at sea religiously. On the other hand, a very 
trifling mark of truthfulness confirms our faith m 
the infallibility of Holy Writ, and the more indi- 
rect and casual the proof the stronger it is. Pro- 
fessor Blunt in his Undesigned Coincidences, and 
Pa ley in his Horce Paulines, or Hours with Paul, 
have brought together a great many incidental 
confirmations of the Bible. A few of these, with 
others that have come to me in a personal investi- 
gation of the subject, will be passed before you 
for your consideration, and, it is to be hoped, for 
your edification. 

The Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments 
have come down the ages like ships; they have 
been "driven by rough winds," they have been 
subjected to severe gales of criticism; but when 
they have seemed about to be lost on the rocks of 
skepticism and infidelity, they have been righted to 
their course by a subtle impulse given at the hand 
of the great Steersman. "Though they are so 
great," yet again and again they have been recov- 
ered to the faith of God's people by some unde- 
signed agreement which has been made to appear 
between different ones of the sacred writers, by 
some unimportant allusion which has been found 
to be true to fact. Hence the significance of our 
text as applied to the Scriptures: "Behold, the 
si lips also, though they are so great, and are driven 
by rough winds, are yet turned about by a very 



INCIDENTAL CONFIRMATIONS. 93 

small rudder, whither the impulse of the steersman 
willeth." Undesigned coincidences will at this 
time be made repeatedly to be the very small rud- 
der which God uses to bring back the Scriptures 
from where some would have them driven by con- 
trary winds. 

1. First, let us look at the Old Testament. 
When Joseph was sold by his brethren it was to a 
caravan, we read in Genesis, " bearing spicery, and 
balm and myrrh, going to carry it down to Egypt." 
There we see a mere allusion to a species of Orien- 
tal traffic carried on with the ancient Egyptians. 
There was no special occasion for mentioning the 
spicery that was being conveyed to Egypt ; the sale 
of a brother was the main subject. But this small 
incident, to which only a passing reference is made, 
fits in with the fact that Egypt needed a great deal 
of this kind of merchandise, and that that country, 
therefore, was a probable and profitable market for 
balm from the East. Years afterward Joseph, as 
we are informed, " embalmed " his father, and it is 
implied that embalming was an Egyptian custom, 
while centuries subsequently we read in the Gospel 
of John about Nicodemus for the burial of Jesus 
" bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about a 
hundred pound weight." If a hundred pounds 
were required for a single body, of course Egypt 
with its practice of embalming was a great market 
for spicery. So remarkably does an indirect allu- 
sion in Genesis tally with fact. The casual refer- 



!)1 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

to Bpicery is the small rudder keeping the ship 
to the straight track of truthfulness. 

Take, again, that great biblical event of the pas- 

of the Jordan. When did it occur? Accord- 
ing to the book of Joshua, it was (and it is stated 
parenthetically as being aside from the chief thing 
to be narrated) when " Jordan overfloweth all its 
banks all the time of harvest." The time is further 
indicated as being " on the tenth day of the first 
month.' 1 That we know from other sources to 
have been four days before the Passover. But the 
Israelites left Egypt at the Passover, just after the 
ten plagues, one of them being the hail by which it 
is said in Exodus " the flax and the barley were 
smitten. " Now, three days before the crossing 
of the Jordan spies were sent into Jericho, where 
they were hidden by Rahab, and how ? We 
read in Joshua that she " hid them with the stalks 
of flax, which she had laid in order upon the roof." 
The smiting of the flax with hail in one book cor- 
responds with the hiding under flax in the other, 
and that, too, though neither writer was speaking 
of flax directly, but the one was describing a plague 
and the other the passage of the Jordan, both which 
events occurred at or near the Passover or harvest. 
They both happened, we say, to mention flax at 
its full development, and thus they unconsciously 
Strengthen each other and our confidence in their 
veracity. They are mutually corroborative, and in 
the most incidental manner. The very indirectness 



INCIDENTAL CONFIRMATIONS. 95 

of this kind of proof is what confirms our faith. It 
is the very small rudder which turns the whole 
ship, which recovers to our assured belief the whole 
Old Testament when driven by the rough winds 
of unbelief. 

Again, we read in Numbers that the spies sent 
by Moses into Canaan saw " men of great stature," 
" sons of Anak." Joshua, however, it is said in 
the book bearing his name, " cut off the Anakim," 
" utterly destroyed them." But pass down to the 
time of David, and we learn from Samuel that the 
giants had not all been exterminated, for " Goliath 
of Gath " defied the armies of the living God. 
Turn back to Joshua, and see if they did entirely 
annihilate the Anakim, and see if you can account 
for "Goliath of Gath." Certainly you can, for 
just beyond what has already been quoted it is 
said, " There was none of the Anakim left in the 
land of the children of Israel : only in Gaza, in 
Gath, and in Ashdod, did some remain." Thus 
do we have three independent witnesses — Moses, 
Joshua and Samuel — agreeing, though they mani- 
festly do not plan for the agreement. This is a 
little item to be taken into account in the considera- 
tion of so great a subject, but it is none the less 
important for that reason. A straw shows which 
way the wind blows. A very small rudder deter- 
mines the course of a great ship. A very minor 
incident helps to establish the whole Old Testa- 
ment. 



THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

At the preaching of Jonah, to proceed in further 
illustration of our topic, there was such repentance 
that we read in the prophet there were "covered 
with sackcloth both man and beast" A singular 
and an improbable way of mourning that was, to 
have the very beasts in the array of mourning. Is 
not the whole narrative of the preaching to the 
Ninevitee proven a myth by this strange circum- 
stance which is related as a fact? It might seem 
BO until we take up a pagan writer, Plutarch, by 
whom we are informed that at the death of Pelop- 
idaa his soldiers "cut off their horses' manes and 
their own hair ;" while at the death of a very dear 
friend Alexander the Great was so overcome " that 
to express his sorrow he immediately ordered the 
manes and tails of all his horses and mules to be 
cut." Thus does a pagan writer, without intending 
it, render credible the sacred writer, who says that 
the kiug of Nineveh, as an expression of repent- 
ance before God, ordered the very flocks and herds 
to be " covered with sackcloth." This is a little 
incident, but it confirms the truthfulness of Jonah, 
that most bitterly assailed of all the books of the 
Bible, and it thus assists in establishing the entire 
Old Testament. It is the very small rudder which 
turns the whole ship. 

Another example : David in adversity experienced 
kindness from an aged Gileadite, and by way of re- 
ward he took into the royal favor a son of his friend 
by the name of "Chimham." There is only the 



INCIDENTAL CONFIRMATIONS. 97 

barest allusion to it in Samuel and Kings. Exactly 
what David did for Chimham it is not said, but 
he probably gave him an estate in the vicinity of 
the court. The name, however, does not appear for 
four hundred years. May it not have been all a 
fable about Chimham experiencing the royal favor? 
Was it real history or was it a beautiful romance ? 
We pass down four centuries and we find Jeremiah 
prophesying. He is describing a time of peril, and 
he is telling of some Jews trying to escape from 
the captivity which came, and he uses this lan- 
guage : " And they departed, and dwelt in Geruth 
(margin, the lodging-place of) Chimham, which is 
by Bethlehem, to go to enter into Egypt, because 
of the Chaldeans." Thus does it appear that Chim- 
ham was an actual person, that he really had expe- 
rienced the royal favor by having an estate settled 
upon him — an estate which bore his name four hun- 
dred years after the event. What is more, the 
prophet was evidently not trying to confirm the 
earlier narrative, for the name of Chimham comes 
in only incidentally as a stopping-place for some 
Jewish refugees on the way to Egypt. So that by 
a dark hint to an event which transpired four cen- 
turies before, by a hint which not one reader in a 
thousand would notice, in so indirect a way is the 
word of God confirmed, and the confirmation is all 
the stronger because entirely undesigned. 

Again, we read in Second Kings, " Now Mesha, 
king of Moab, was a sheepmaster ; and he rendered 
7 



THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

unto the king of Israel the wool of an hundred 
thousand lambs, and of an hundred thousand rams." 
Hut this Moabite king rebelled ; he determined to 
have relief from the oppressive tribute imposed. 
We Uarn further from the scriptural narrative that 
he was overwhelmingly defeated, but that he rallied 
in a last stronghold, and that there he made to his 
god, upon the wall in full sight of the besieging 
Israelites, the costly burnt-offering of his first-born 
son. And what was the result? The biblical an- 
swer is, " And there was great wrath against Israel : 
and they departed from him, and returned to their 
own land." That is, the Israelites, horrified at the 
human, and at the same time inhuman, sacrifice, re- 
linquished the siege for fear of a divine judgment 
upon them as being indirectly the cause of the great 
wickedness committed, and the Moabite monarch 
thus gained his end, the independence of his king- 
dom, and, as he believed and as it seemed, through 
the divine favor secured by the open sacrifice of his 
son. This all seems very improbable, does it not? 
Happening, too, nine hundred years before Christ, 
it becomes the more doubtful, even if it is related 
in the Bible. But there has come in these recent 
times a remarkable confirmation of the scriptural 
Btory. In 1868 a traveler in the ancient territory 
of the Moabites came upon a stone three feet nine 
inches long, two feet four inches wide and one foot 
two inches thick. This is the famous Moabite 
lie, one of the most marvelous discoveries in this 



INCIDENTAL CONFIRMATIONS. 99 

century of wonders. It is now in London, and 
what does it contain ? An inscription made by the 
Moabite king himself nine centuries before the 
Christian era, and establishing the truthfulness of 
the inspired record. " I, Mesha," is the reading in 
chiseled and imperishable characters, " erected this 
stone to Chemosh, . . . for he saved me from 
all despoilers and let me see my desire upon all my 
enemies." And who were among his enemies? 
The Moabite Stone replies, the " king of Israel, 
who oppressed Moab many days." Thus are the 
very stones crying out in defence of God's word 
and of our holy religion. 

Still, again : profane historians relate that the 
capture of Babylon took place under Nabonnedus, 
not under Belshazzar, whom Daniel names. Skep- 
tics used to enlarge upon this discrepancy, as well 
as upon other contradictions. But a few years ago 
in the vicinity of Babylon was found a cylinder 
which gave the information that Nabonnedus had 
a son by the name of Belshazzar who was associated 
with the father in the government. A complete 
harmony is thus established between the profane his- 
torian and sacred narrator, while at the same time a 
casual remark of the latter is explained. Belshazzar, 
according to Daniel, had promised that the reader 
of the handwriting on the wall should be " third 
ruler in the kingdom." Why not second, instead 
of third ? The association of two monarchs, Na- 
bonnedus and Belshazzar, in ruling clears up 



100 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

what was long a mystery. The inspired writer 
casually remarks that the reader of the handwriting 
was to be made " third " in the kingdom, and no 
one knew why third till a cylinder a little while ago 
revealed the secret by its allusion to the Babylonian 
throne being occupied by father and son jointly, 
who of course would be first and second, although 
Daniel directly mentions only one of the two. We 
could go on indefinitely giving specifications of the 
incidental confirmation of the Old Testament. Re- 
peatedly, a very small rudder rights the ship of 
God's word when driven by the rough winds of 
skeptical assault. 

2. We have, in the second place, just as striking 
confirmations of the New Testament. Does Paul 
say in his Epistle to the Ephesians, "I am an ani- 
bassador in chains"? The historian in Acts makes 
him say, "I am bound with this chain." Does 
the historic narrative say, "Saul laid waste the 
Church"? He confirms this when he writes his 
letter to the Galatians, "Beyond measure I per- 
secuted the Church of God." Does Luke write 
that Timothy was "the son of a Jewess"? Paul 
intimates (and an intimation is stronger proof some- 
times than a direct assertion) the same thing when 
in his Epistle to Timothy he says, "From a babe 
thou hast known the sacred writings." To be sure, 
he had known the Scriptures from childhood if he 
had a Jewish mother. The words of Luke and 
Paul in this way, without design, are mutually 



INCIDENTAL CONFIRMATIONS. 101 

confirmatory. Does Luke affirm that the Sadducees 
say, "There is no resurrection, neither angel, nor 
spirit"? Josephus, who was born 37 A. D., and 
thus belonged to the first century of the Christian 
era, says, "The doctrine of the Sadducees is 
this, that souls die with the bodies." Thus Jew 
and Christian agree, and that, too, without col- 
lusion. 

Quite aside from his main purpose, the writer of 
the Acts speaks of " the Beautiful Gate of the tem- 
ple." The Jewish historian, without any reference 
to Luke, tells of a gate of the temple which 
"greatly excelled" the others, and which was 
"adorned after a most costly manner, as having 
much richer and thicker plates of silver and gold " 
than the rest. Did the priest of Jupiter, according 
to the Acts, bring " oxen and garlands " to sacrifice 
in honor of ihe apostles ? In a triumph voted to 
an ancient general there figured, according to classic 
story (Plutarch), "a hundred and twenty stalled 
oxen, with their horns gilded and their heads 
adorned with ribbons and garlands" Thus accu- 
rate as to facts which we are inclined to dispute are 
the New-Testament writers, and when without con- 
trivance they are corroborated by pagan testimony, 
we must believe that those who were faithful in re- 
cording what was least are equally trustworthy in 
their narration of weightier matters. 

Did Paul slander the Cretans when in his letter 
to Titus he warned them against " teaching things 



102 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

which they ought not, for filthy lucre's sake"? 
Nay, this accords with the character ascribed to 
them by Plutarch in his life of Perseus, who was 
noted for being covetous, and who "cheated," it is 
-aid, hifl C/rctan followers, not giving them the 
money lie promised for some valuable plate. The 
historian adds, " He only played the Cretan with 
the Cretans." The inspired and the uninspired 
writers agree in the character ascribed to those 
islanders, and yet the harmony between the two 
was unintentional. A little and yet a significant 
circumstance is this : it is the very small rudder 
turning the whole ship, large though it be; it is 
one of those undesigned coincidences which con- 
firm the truth of the whole New Testament. 

Does this inspired book tell us of the crucifixion 
of Christ by Pilate, and of his followers being 
" called Christians"? The Roman Tacitus of the 
first century speaks of "persons commonly called 
Christians who were hated for their enormities. 
Christufi, the founder of that name, was put to death 
i criminal by Pontius Pilate." Does Luke in 
the Acts say, "Claudius had commanded all the 
Jews to depart from Rome " ? Suetonius, a Latin 
contemporary, says of the same emperor, "He 
banished from Rome all the Jews, who were con- 
tinually making disturbances at the instigation of 
one Chrcstus;" that is, Christ. These are little 
things, but they harmonize wonderfully and with- 
OUl anv purpose of that kind. 



INCIDENTAL CONFIRMATIONS. 103 

"When the multitude was to be miraculously fed 
on the other side of the Sea of Galilee, John says 
that Jesus asked " Philip " where bread could be 
bought. Why, do you suppose, was the question 
directed to Philip ? Well, we can ascertain why in a 
circuitous way. From Luke we learn that the 
exact locality of the miracle was in the vicinity of 
" a city called Bethsaida." Then we are told by 
John, but not in connection with the miracle, that 
" Philip was from Bethsaida." In this roundabout 
manner do we see why Philip was asked where bread 
could be secured. He was brought up in that 
neighborhood, and would know, if any one did, 
where the desired purchase could be made. This 
is indirect but very strong evidence for the truthful- 
ness of John in that, without saying that the feed- 
ing of the multitude was at Bethsaida, he made 
Christ ask concerning a place for buying bread of 
the disciple who would be apt to know because of 
the locality being near his native city. It is one of 
those minor touches which establish the veracity 
of the New Testament. 

Again does the small rudder appear when Paul 
in his letter to the Romans commends to them 
Phcebe, "a servant of the church which is at 
Cenchrea" and when it is remarked of him in 
the most casual way in the Acts, " having shorn 
his head in Cenchrea" The one reference shows 
that he was acquainted with a member of the 
church there, and the other that he had been there ; 



in I THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

and without any intention they confirm each other 
and strengthen our faith in the whole New Testa- 
nicnt. 

Once more: we read in Colossians, "Onesimus, 
the faithful and beloved brother, who is one of 
yon ; w that is, one of the Colossians. Can this be, 
not directly, but indirectly, proved? Turn to 
Philemon, and Onesimus is found to be a "ser- 
vant" of Philemon. But did Philemon live in 
Colosfi e? The letter to him does not give us any 
information on this point, but the Epistle does con- 
tain greetings to Philemon "and to Archippus" 
Where did Archippus reside? The Epistle to the 
Colossians says, " Say to Archippus, Take heed to 
the ministry which thou hast received." So that 
Archippus was of Colosse, and hence Philemon 
was, who is coupled with him in the letter to 
Philemon, and therefore Onesimus was of Colosse, 
for he was a slave of Philemon ; and in this cir- 
cuitous manner is established the truth of what the 
apostle wrote to the Colossians : Onesimus, " who is 
one of you." These circumstantial coincidences are 
what give credibility to the testimony of different 
witnesses in court, and it is these minute agreements 
without design which prove the truthfulness of the 
various writers of the New Testament. 

The feet is, that both the Old Testament and 
the New are constantly being verified in the most 
indirect and yet positive ways by the marvelous 
discoveries which are taking place. There is the 



INCIDENTAL CONFIRMATIONS. 105 

oft-mentioned case, already referred to in a pre- 
vious chapter, of the proper title of Sergius 
Paulus, who governed the island of Cyprus at the 
time of Paul's visit. Luke was long thought to 
have made a mistake in calling this ruler " pro- 
consul " instead of " propraetor/' but among the 
confirmations of his entire accuracy is none stronger 
than the finding by General Cesnola, in modern 
excavations at Cyprus, of a coin bearing the in- 
scription, "In the proconsulship of Paulus" who 
may have been the Sergius Paulus named by the 
sacred historian, and whose title at least was def- 
initely fixed beyond all controversy. Two other 
very striking incidents are worth mentioning because 
of their important bearing. Since we read in 
Haggai, " and will make thee as a signet," very 
significantly, within a few years, at the sinking of 
a shaft to the depth of forty-three feet outside the 
wall of Jerusalem, there has been discovered amid 
fragments of pottery and glass a gentleman's seal, 
a finely-grained black stone, with the inscription, 
"Haggai the son of Shebaniah" The lettering is 
of the kind used at the time of the Babylonian 
Captivity. The prophet Haggai was one of the 
exiles who returned to Jerusalem under the lead 
of Zerubbabel. The seal found may therefore be 
the one which suggested Haggai's words when he 
said of his leader, " and will make thee as a signet." 
The prophet may have held up before Zerubbabel 
his own signet, and possibly the very seal lately 



Km; THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

exhumed, and certainly inscribed with the name of 
"Haggai" When, again, like that noble Roman 
who bought at its full price the very ground on 
which the army of Hannibal was encamped, Jere- 
miah with all confidence in the future made his 
ancestral purchase in his native Anathoth over 
which the Babylonian engines of war were rolling, 
the prophet said of this famous business transaction, 
u 1 subscribed the deed, and sealed it;" And how 
he prised his seal is indicated by that other verse 
in his prophecy where he represents God as saying 
of the king of Judah that though he " were the 
Bignet upon my right hand, yet would I pluck thee 
thence." In connection with all this is the very 
suggestive fact that among recent discoveries in 
Egypt, where we find the prophet in his later life, 
is a remarkable seal with Phoenician characters 
which read, "To the Prosperity of Jeremiah" The 
type of lettering is assigned to the seventh century 
before Christ, and hence the seal, it has been said, 
" may be a veritable relic of the great Hebrew 
prophet Jeremiah." These surely are wonderful 
incidental confirmations of the prophetic writings. 
The conclusion of the whole matter is, that both 
Testaments, Old and New, have come down many 
centuries over a tempestuous sea, assailed by fierce 
galea of an unbelieving criticism, but as often as 
they have been driven out toward the rocks of 
infidelity, they have been veered back into the 
confidence of Christians bv some undesigned coin- 



INCIDENTAL CONFIRMATIONS. 107 

cidence, by some incidental confirmation of their 
entire truthfulness. " Behold, the ships also, though 
they are so great, and are driven by rough winds, 
are yet turned about by a very small rudder, 
whither the impulse of the steersman willeth." 
So it has been with the Holy Scriptures, and let us 
thank God for their preservation and complete 
establishment in ways so circuitous and undesigned. 
God by a very small rudder has repeatedly kept 
them straight on their course to carry the gospel 
of glad tidings to all the world. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE BIBLE AND SCIENCE; OR, THE CREATIVE 
WEEK, 

"For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the 
sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day." — 
Ex. 20: 11. 

WE will take a general and a specific view of 
the subject suggested by this text, which 
brings at once to our thought the topic of the 
Bible and Science. 

1. The creative week, as described by Moses in 
the first chapter of Genesis, has probably caused 
more discussion than any other portion of Scripture ; 
nor have Genesis and geology yet been harmonized 
in a way that satisfies all minds. There are those 
to whom the differences between religion and science 
at this very starting-point of the controversy seem 
irreconcilable, and they accordingly reject the whole 
Bcheme of revelation, and they acknowledge noth- 
ing but nature. The first article of the unbeliever's 
creed lias been stated in this fashion: "I believe 
that there is no God, but that matter is God, and 
God is matter; and that it is no matter whether 
there i- any God or not." 

108 



THE BIBLE AND SCIENCE. 109 

But while some consider the Mosaic cosmogony 
as wholly mythical, and while others regard it as 
allegorical — a picture at best of the great epochs in 
creation — most biblical scholars hold that the nar- 
rative is essentially historical and altogether true. 
Still, no intelligent interpreter now maintains that 
the whole creation took place in six literal days. 
That was for centuries the prevailing view (al- 
though Augustine and others of the early Fathers 
did not hold to it), but it was long the general 
view, which at first was not abandoned, though it 
did seem to conflict with geologic facts. 

What if the sedimentary formations were such 
as to indicate a work of thousands and perhaps 
millions of years ? It was argued that God could 
have formed the deposits at once. So could he form 
the blade of grass in an instant, but we see that he 
does not, and it is difficult to believe that he in a 
moment's time created the sandstones, whose for- 
mation a natural and protracted growth, such as is 
going on to-day, better explains. What if the 
rocks did contain fossil remains which seemed to 
show that animals and plants existed long ages 
before the assumed time of the creation? God 
could have instantly created a fossil, it was claimed, 
to represent an animal or a plant which never really 
existed. He perhaps could have done so, but it is 
not at all likely that he did. 

That argument failed to satisfy the human mind. 
If, in excavating, the remains of a buried city 



110 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

Bhoold be exhumed, people would believe that it 
had been built there naturally by a generation of 
living men. Of course God might have imbedded 
in the earth, by a fiat of his, just such ruins when 
be called this universe into being, but only the 
most ignorant would give credence to any such 
theory. So the discovery of fossils deep down in 
sedimentary rocks which could have been formed 
by the slow deposits of waters only during a period 
tar longer than the commonly accepted age of this 
world, forces the reason to believe that, for in- 
stance, the foot-tracks of those immense animals 
u which stalked on the Permian sands and mud " 
were impressed there naturally by those gigantic 
creatures when those alluvial deposits were made 
thousands and thousands of years ago, and that God 
did not six millenniums ago by a miraculous act 
imprint life-like tracks in the stratified layers just 
to deceive man. Likewise the petrified leaf or tree 
cannot be thought to be a supernatural, but a nat- 
ural, formation. We did not see it turn to stone, 
but we know it did, because we can trace the orig- 
inal vegetable lines and characteristics. So that 
a progressive creation is no longer doubted, the prog- 
ress extending over more than six days of twenty- 
four hours each. 

There are two main methods of giving time for 
the geologic formations. The one is to fix a great 
gulf between the first verse of the inspired record 
and what follows : " In the beginning God created 



THE BIBLE AND SCIENCE, 111 

the heaven and the earth." To that indefinite 
period, " in the beginning," can be assigned those 
long ages of which we read in the books — Cam- 
brian, Silurian, Carboniferous, or Primary, Second- 
ary and Tertiary, or Azoic, Mesozoic and Palaeozoic, 
and so on up through the technical list ; — these all 
would belong to the " in the beginning." Then 
would follow six natural days, during which the 
previous chaotic disorder, by fiats of the Almighty, 
would be resolved into the beautiful cosmos which 
became the habitation of man. 

The other method of reconciling the geologic and 
Mosaic records is to make the days to be vast 
stretches of time. The most prominent advocates 
of this view from the scientific standpoint are Pro- 
fessor Dana of Yale and the late Professor Guyot 
of Princeton College, and their explanations are 
certainly very plausible ; and it is not strange that 
a large portion of Christendom seems to be settling 
down to an acceptance of the harmony which can 
thus be established. It violates no law of herme- 
neutics, no sound exegetical principle, to prolong in- 
definitely the six days of creation. We are assured 
by the sacred writers themselves that one day is 
with the Lord as a thousand years. Then such ex- 
pressions as these are found in the Bible : " the day 
of salvation," " the day of wrath," " the day of 
temptation," " the day of trouble," " the day of 
Egypt," where manifestly there is no hour-limit. 
In the very narrative of the creation the word is 



112 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

employed to mark varying periods of duration. It 
occurs three times before the appearance of the sun 
at all — of that orb which gave the present succes- 
sion of darkness and light. Once it is used to cover 
the whole process of the creation — " in the day 
that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens," 
this day being thus coextensive with the six days 
previously mentioned. As a matter of interpreta- 
tion, therefore, there can be no objection to making 
the days denote geologic ages, as the scholarly Tay- 
ler Lewis long ago did in his famous Six Days of 
Creation. 

A more important question is, Is the order of 
creation the same scripturally that it is scientifically? 
The parallelism is so marked as to have convinced 
the master-minds of even the eminent scientists to 
whom reference has been made that the two revela- 
tions, in the word of truth and in the work of na- 
ture, must be alike from God. The Yale professor, 
in his Manual of Geology, says : " The order of 
events in the Scripture cosmogony corresponds es- 
sentially with that which has been given " (in his 
book) ; and he sees in this "a far-reaching prophecy 
to which philosophy could not have attained, how- 
ever instructed." The distinguished Princeton nat- 
uralist was so struck with the resemblances that he 
wrote a little volume on Creation ; or, Tlie Biblical 
Cosmogony in the Light of Modern Science, in which 
his enthusiasm kindles because of what he calls 
" the grand cosmogonic week described by Moses." 



THE BIBLE AND SCIENCE. 113 

Principal Dawson of Canada, in his Origin of the 
World, still more minutely presents the wonderful 
agreement of the Bible and science. It is the 
thoughts of such specialists that we have endeavored 
to assimilate and are trying to unfold. 

In these times of skeptical contrasts drawn be- 
tween creation and evolution, to the disparagement 
of the former, we need to bear in mind that they are 
not necessarily antagonistic — that there are theistic 
and Christian evolutionists, like the late Professor 
Gray of Harvard and botany fame, and like the 
lamented Agassiz. Let us only become acquainted 
with the facts, and we shall not be frightened at in- 
fidel claims of divergence and opposition, and our 
faith will not waver in the least as we repeat the 
words spoken of old by inspiration : " For in six 
days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and 
all that in them is, and rested the seventh day." 

2. Turning now to details, let us follow along 
the latest paths of science over the creative week, 
and let us see how they do not diverge at all from 
the old paths of religion. 

The first day, or geologic age, was characterized 
by the creation of matter and by the appearance of 
light. The universe was called into being, but in a 
chaotic or nebulous condition — u the earth was waste 
and void." A nebula was created, diffused through 
space, but this vapory mass was inert till God said, 
" Let there be light." This was not the light of 
the sun (which had not yet appeared), but cosmical 

8 



114 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

light, a light produced by molecular action. The 
Almighty imparted a rotary motion to the igneous 
mass ; he set it revolving ; he gave it laws of action 
which still operate in gravity, in chemical and other 
natural forces. This was the beginning, a fire-mist 
turning on an axis, matter in activity. " A flash 
of light through the universe," says the scientist 
(Dana condensing from Guyot), " would be the first 
announcement of the work begun." So much for 
the first day, for its evening and morning — " a fa- 
miliar metaphor," we are told (Dana) with appar- 
ent good reason, to indicate "the beginning and 
consummation of each work," for there was as yet 
no solar day. There was simply luminosity from 
the movements of multitudinous atoms. 

The second day, or geologic age, was marked by 
the separation of the waters from the waters by a 
firmament. The gaseous would in time by contrac- 
tion become the molten, of the consistency of water. 
Such waters were separated from waters ; the great 
watery bulk broke up into different globules of still 
immense proportions. On the first day matter was 
created and endowed with force, but it was one 
whirling, fluid mass, with vast sphericity. As it 
cooled and condensed it would revolve more and 
more rapidly, till the centrifugal force became 
greater than the centripetal, and portion after por- 
tion, like so many watery drops, w r ould be thrown 
off, each assuming a spheroidal shape by the laws 
of motion. One of these vast revolving masses 



THE BIBLE AND SCIENCE. 115 

would be the original material of our solar system, 
which in turn would break up, and the planets would 
in this way be formed ; and they too, as often as they 
threw off a portion of their still liquid bulk, would 
have a satellite or moon. Thus our present solar 
system would be gradually produced or evolved, 
with the central mass constituting the sun, which is 
still a glowing, heated ball. This dividing and sub- 
dividing of primordial matter occupied the second 
day. The earth, before included in the general 
mass, was individualized, was given a separate ex- 
istence, a definite shape. Its waters were divided 
off from the other waters. This liquid globe of 
ours became defined, disentangled from the rest of 
the fire-mist. The exact words of the scientist 
(Guyot) in describing the work of the second day 
are : " The vast primitive nebula of the first day 
breaks up into a multitude of gaseous masses, and 
these are concentrated into stars." One of these 
nebulous stars would be the earth. 

The third day came, and with it, according to the 
biblical narrative, continents and oceans and vege- 
tation. This accords with the geological facts. 
The unfinished earth would cool and contract, and 
the condensed vapors would make a sea covering 
the entire surface of the globe. The heated sphere 
with its cooling crust would naturally crumple up, 
form into great wrinkles, acquire elevations and de- 
pressions, and there would thus result the sea and 
the dry land. Then the lower plant-organisms 



1 1 iy THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

would start, while yet the waters were too hot for 
animal Life; and it is worth observing that some forms 
of vegetation can exist at two hundred degrees Fah- 
renheit. The earth would be a great humid, shaded 
hothouse, giving rise to those luxuriant growths to 
which the everlasting rocks testify, when ferns at- 
tained the height of our most stately forest trees. 
Whether vegetation developed without a creative act 
from existent matter is not clear. One thing is 
certain, no experiments have yet succeeded in ar- 
ranging material particles so as to produce living 
species; spontaneous generation is yet unproved. 
Possibly vegetation did develop from matter en- 
dowed from the beginning with germinant force 
under favorable conditions, for the language is, 
" Let the earth bring forth" There was an absolute 
creation on the first day, but the word (i create " is 
not used of the work of the second day, when, 
therefore, the earth may have been, and seems to 
have been, evolved from the general mass ; and the 
word " create" is not used of the work of the third 
day, when it would seem as if continents and oceans 
were formed by a natural process, and when possibly 
vegetation was developed from the earth, and not 
strictly created ; when the creation would be mediate 
— from pre-existent materials. These are unsettled 
points, but there is no doubt as to the agreement in 
the main events of the third day in Genesis and of 
the corresponding age in geology. 

Strange as it may seem, Moses has no sun, no 



THE BIBLE AND SCIENCE. 117 

moon, no stars till the fourth day ; but this, too, is 
in accordance with the revelation which science has 
to make. While the earth was hot it would have a 
steaming atmosphere. Thick vapors would con- 
stantly rise from the waters, and there would never 
be the absence of dense clouds. Even when the first 
vegetation appeared at a possible temperature of 
two hundred degrees, there must have arisen great 
volumes of steam. The humidity of the air must 
have been beyond anything experienced now, even 
in our fogs that fairly drip and that prevent vision 
farther than a few feet. By continued cooling the 
water would to a less and less degree be converted 
into cloud, and the encircling envelope of fog would 
at length break and vanish, and the sun would for 
the first time blaze forth. The moon would also 
swing in her orbit a thing of beauty, and the stars 
would flash their brightness on the scene. Thus 
" God made two great lights " on the fourth day, so 
we read, " and he made the stars also." That is, 
he made them to appear, for the word here is not 
" create." What wonderful exactness of language ! 
and how amazing that the unscientific Moses had 
our luminaries to shine forth in just the right geo- 
logic time ! He had them created in the beginning, 
when they belonged to the first nebulous mass, but 
he did not have them outlined in a clear sky till the 
earth had sufficiently cooled to cease forming impen- 
etrable clouds. Verily, great and marvelous are 
God's works as they appear in the scriptural and 



118 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

scientific facts connected with the fourth day in the 
creative week. 

The fifth day consistently introduces the lower or- 
ders of animal life, which yet is higher than vegetable 
life, and here for the first since the original creation 
the strong word " create" occurs, as if to teach that 
♦there is no development from plant to beast. 

The sixth day ushers in the higher animals, with 
man to crown the work, and with reference to him 
again a creation is asserted, and repeated three times, 
as if to emphasize his entire distinctness from the 
brute, out of which he could not have been evolved 
any more than the animal from the plant; and the 
scientist himself (Dana) bears this testimony : " No 
remains of ancient man have been found that are 
of a lower grade than the lowest of existing tribes ; 
none that show any less of the erect posture and of 
other characteristics of the exalted species." Of 
the development of animal life from its lowest forms 
up through the reptilian age, when great bird-like 
and kangaroo-shaped creatures raising themselves 
on their hind legs stood eighty feet high in our own 
Colorado — of the progress of animal life up to man 
during the fifth and sixth days — Guyot says that 
Scripture gives " the precise order indicated by 
geology." 

Thus the harmony between the six days of 
Genesis and the corresponding ages of geology is 
complete. Both recognize a gradual development, 
and both find crises where evolution must be 



THE BIBLE AND SCIENCE. 119 

supplemented by creation; and the only question 
of debate is how often the purely creative acts 
occurred. An original creation can never be dis- 
proved, and if it should be finally established that 
humanity itself was evolved out of some primordial 
organism, there will still be a Creator to adore and 
worship in Him who could endow a floating nebula 
with such potency as to develop a system of worlds, 
a fiery globe, a green earth, bright skies, bird and 
beast, and that lord of all — imperial man. 

The seventh day well came with its absence of 
special creative energy, extending over the entire 
history of mankind. The era of human existence 
is God's Sabbath. It also is a geologic day, having 
lasted already at least six thousand years, during 
which God has, in a measure, been resting. Such is 
the creative week, with its culminating glory in this 
wonderful Sabbatic age of man. And Guyot notes 
a striking circumstance when he says, " At the end 
of each of the six working days of creation we 
find an evening. But the morning of the seventh 
is not followed by any evening. The day is still 
open. When the evening shall come the last hour 
of humanity will strike." As this moment, prac- 
tically for each of us, is rapidly approaching in the 
certainty of death, and as God has his Sabbath of 
holy complacency in his work, let us, in our smaller 
way, after our six days of labor have a seventh 
when we can be still and worshipful, when we can 
contemplate such noble themes as that which has 



120 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

been occupying our attention. May we ever after 
this, in view of the thought which has been pre- 
sented, be able to say with a sublimer significance, 
with a firmer faith, with a more devotional and 
reverent spirit, and with a gladder heart, "Remem- 
ber the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. . . . For in 
six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, 
and all that in them is, and rested the seventh 
day." 



CHAPTER IX. 

THE BIBLE AND THE MUMMIES OF THE 
PHARAOHS. 

"And shewedst signs and wonders upon Pharaoh, and on 
all his servants, and on all the people of his land ; for thou 
knewest that they dealt proudly against them ; and didst get 
thee a name, as it is this day." — Neh. 9 : 10. 

IN the spring of 1887 the papers contained the 
startling news that the remains of Lincoln had 
been examined and recognized preparatory to what 
might be hoped to be the final interment of our 
great martyr-President. More than twenty years 
had elapsed since he died, but his features still 
bore the old familiar expression. Wonderful, we 
say, that the loved face of the distinguished dead 
should have been kept in such a state of preserva- 
tion ! More marvelous is the fact to which our 
attention is now to be directed. Through the eyes 
of actual observers we are to look upon the coun- 
tenances of some of the Pharaohs of Egypt. 
Napoleon stimulated his soldiers to gain the cele- 
brated victory at the battle of the Pyramids as in 
full view of those monuments of antiquity he said, 
" From those summits forty centuries contemplate 
your actions." To-day not only the stupendous 

121 



122 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

works of the Pharaohs, but those monarchs them- 
selves, are literally looking down upon all travelers 
to Egypt in the mummies which have lately been 
discovered at Thebes. 

Many have been growing incredulous of what is 
related in the Bible of the ancient rulers of Egypt 
in connection with biblical characters. Skepticism 
has been assailing Moses, has been sneering at his 
" mistakes/' till some have come to regard him as 
a mythical personage. The story of Joseph has 
been called a beautiful romance, but nothing more. 
One school of the higher criticism has been trying 
to undermine the historical accuracy of the whole 
Pentateuch. " The signs and wonders upon Pha- 
raoh " of which the text speaks have been regarded 
as idle tales, as the imaginations of superstitious 
minds, like the fables with which classic story 
abounds. But just when the assaults of infidelity 
upon the early scriptural narratives have been 
made with the greatest confidence of utterly demol- 
ishing the foundations of revealed religion, there 
have come confirmations of the Bible truly astonish- 
ing. Greater, if anything, than the miracles of old 
have been the revelations of the last few years, 
whereby the mummies of some of the greatest of 
the Pharaohs have been discovered. 

It is well known that embalming was carried to 
a state of almost perfection by the Egyptians. 
For eenturies the art was practiced, and it has been 
estimated that there must be in the land of the 



THE BIBLE AND THE PHARAOHS. 123 

Nile from four hundred to seven hundred million 
mummies. These are constantly being brought to 
light, and a few dollars will now purchase one of 
these dry, shriveled bodies of ages ago. 

In 1881 there flashed over the wires to England, 
France and the whole world the announcement 
of a rich "find" of royal mummies. In 1882 
came the official reports of professors and archaeo- 
logical authorities. Experts in, Egyptology had 
for some time been struck with rare ornaments 
coming into circulation, the inscriptions on which 
indicated that they had been worn by royalty in 
very remote times. These came from three brothers 
who would not reveal the source whence they were 
deriving a very handsome revenue. They hinted 
that they had greater treasures yet which might in 
the future be produced for a consideration. They, 
however, kept their profitable secret till the impris- 
onment of one of them, and the fear of the other 
two that he would divulge the secret and alone 
receive the promised reward, led to the revealing 
of the place — a cave full of royal mummies. 

In the solid rock anciently had been sunk a shaft 
six feet and a half square and about thirty-seven 
feet deep. At the bottom of this was a long and 
winding passage, ending in a chamber or vault 
twenty-three feet long by thirteen feet wide. In 
this subterranean room reposed nearly forty mum- 
mies, some of which have proved to be the em- 
balmed bodies of the greatest of the Pharaohs. 



1 2 I THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

They were removed, and packed as so much freight 
in a modern steamer, which, puffing and whistling, 
bore them triumphantly over the very waters along 
which had swept the magnificent funeral-barges of 
the same mighty dead between three and four thou- 
sand years ago. What a commentary on human 
neatness ! Those mummied Pharaohs now adorn a 
museum at Boolak on the Nile, a short distance from 
Cairo. These are the "signs and wonders upon 
Pharaoh/ 1 to quote from our text, " as it is this day." 
What Pharaohs have been found ? Pharaoh was 
the name of an office rather than of any one ruler. 
It was like Caesar in Roman annals, like Czar in 
Russian history, like President in our own country. 
It meant " Great House," and thus corresponded to 
" Sublime Porte " in Turkey at present. The house 
of Pharaoh teas great. It furnished a long line of 
famous monarchs who reigned in splendor through 
hundreds of years. They dealt proudly against 
God's people, but Nehemiah declares that the Lord 
got him a name by the " signs and wonders upon 
Pharaoh." This was true of the miracles wrought 
anciently, and it is no less true of the mummies 
which have been providentially found just when 
the attacks upon the Mosaic books have been most 
ere and confident. The higher criticism of the 
skeptical sort goes down before the mummied 
Pharaohs who have been authenticated, duly num- 
bered aud laid away on shelves. Let us inquire 
who some of them are. 



THE BIBLE AND THE PHARAOHS. 125 

1. It is not certain who the Pharaoh of Joseph's 
time was, but among those unwrapt in the summer 
of 1886 was Thotmes the Third, who is noted as the 
great obelisk-maker, and Joseph lived in On, the 
city of the Sun, where the obelisks principally 
stood. They were meant to point to the orb of 
day, that object of Egyptian worship, somewhat as 
our church-spires point heavenward to direct our 
thoughts thither. When the sarcophagus of Thot- 
mes, the obelisk-maker, was opened, there was dis- 
covered a little wasp which had evidently been at- 
tracted by the perfumes and the flowers used in 
burial, and which had inadvertently been sealed up 
with the dead monarch. Thotmes was not tall, only 
five feet and two inches, but he seems to have had 
lofty aspirations, or he would not have erected so 
many obelisks, one of which now stands in Central 
Park, New York City. That is something very 
tangible to link us to the distant past. There is 
nothing mythical and unreal about that grand 
pyramid of stone, weighing over two hundred tons, 
but slender and graceful, and tapering needle-like 
to a point, so that when Augustus Caesar had it re- 
moved to Alexandria to commemorate his conquest 
of Egypt soon after the death of the most beautiful 
of Egyptian queens, it was not inappropriately called 
Cleopatra's Needle — a name which it still bears, 
although it was first erected by Thotmes in the city 
of Joseph's residence. There it stood, with others, 
at the entrance to the temple of the Sun. It is not 



126 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

certain when Joseph lived, but if at the later date 
to which he is assigned by scholars, then he looked 
upon this identical obelisk. His father-in-law, the 
priest of On, daily passed it as he went into the 
temple to officiate at the altar. This priest's 
daughter, who became the wife of Joseph, in this 
case, must have often been helped in her devo- 
tions by the stately monolith reaching with its top 
toward the sky, the source of light. As another 
has said, the morning she became a bride would be 
ushered in by prayers whose inspiration would in 
part arise from the sight of the heavenward-point- 
ing obelisk upon which Ave to-day gaze with awe 
and pleasure, and at whose base the traveler 
stands amid a rush of historic memories. Whether 
Joseph and his Egyptian wife saw this obelisk or 
not — and they probably did — they at any rate saw 
that father of obelisks which still stands at Heliop- 
olis, and which, we are told, was raised on its ped- 
estal before Abraham was born. Now the great 
obelisk-maker was Thotmes, whose mummy, with 
others, has recently been unrolled. Unfortunately, 
he crumbled to dust soon after his exposure to the 
air, but not till he had been photographed. We 
c<an therefore look upon the picture of the Pharaoh 
who did most to adorn with obelisks the city where 
Joseph rose to distinction. How much more real 
such a fact makes the person with whose dramatic 
history we are familiar as from slavery and the 
dungeon he rose to be second only to Pharaoh ! 



THE BIBLE AND THE PHARAOHS, 127 

The Pharaoh who did most for the city where 
Joseph married his wife has been seen within the 
last three years. His mummied face has been 
actually observed by more than one, and a granite 
column which he made can be seen by every visitor 
to the metropolis of our country. How strange 
and wonderful it all is ! " Signs and wonders upon 
Pharaoh " " as it is this day." 

2. Another Pharaoh whose mummy in the Boo- 
lak Museum is putting honor upon God's word is 
Seti the First. We read in Scripture of " Pharaoh's 
daughter " who went down to the river to bathe, 
and who saw caught in reeds of the Nile a beautiful 
babe in a little ark. We have always had a warm 
feeling for the princess who was touched by the 
tears of the helpless innocent, and who named him 
Moses, which means " drawn out," in allusion to 
his having been taken out of the water. How we 
would like to look upon the kindly face of her to 
whom the young sister of the saved child went with 
a proposition to find a nurse, while the ingenious 
plan was carried out of the mother herself being 
brought for the tender service ! How we would 
like to see the features of Pharaoh's daughter, who 
gave Moses his early training, initiating him into 
" all the wisdom of the Egyptians " ! We may yet 
see the face of this fair princess. Meanwhile we 
are permitted to look upon the face of her supposed 
father (or possibly grandfather), Seti, who may have 
begun the Oppression, but who now lies a mummy in 



128 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

a museum on the Nile not far from the place where 
the child Moses was rescued from a fate which act- 
ually was that of multitudes of other babes. Great 
power had this Pharaoh then, but now his sarcoph- 
agus is in an English museum, and he himself is 
fated to serve as a curiosity on the very scene of his 
tyranny. He graces a niche at Boolak, and of him 
Dr. C. S. Robinson says, with a fine sarcasm, " the 
most beautiful mummy-head which ever found a 
place in the museum." Such is the father, as is 
believed, of " Pharaoh's daughter." Can it be pos- 
sible? It is, wonderfully confirming the word of 
God. It is among the " signs and wonders upon 
Pharaoh " " as it is this day." 

3. The next Pharaoh has been identified beyond 
all shadow of a doubt as the one who specially 
made the Israelites to sigh and groan " by reason 
of the bondage." In Exodus we read of the poor 
slaves, " And they built for Pharaoh store-cities, 
Pithom and Raamses." Recent excavations have 
laid bare one of these, Pithom. What is seen ? A 
brick wall twenty-two feet thick and six hundred 
and fifty feet long each side. Nearly all the en- 
closed space is occupied with solidly-built square 
chambers, separated by brick walls eight to ten feet 
thick, without windows or doors. This, from the 
in<rriptions, has been found to be Pithom, and 
Rawlinson, the historian and Egyptologist, says 
there is "no reasonable doubt that one of the two 
cities built by the Israelites has been laid bare." It 



THE BIBLE AND THE PHARAOHS. 129 

is also stated that some of the bricks are of a su- 
perior and others of an inferior quality, some with 
straw and others without, or at least without the 
proper quality and quantity. It was bricks for this 
store-city that the Israelites had to furnish in un- 
diminished numbers each day, even after govern- 
ment had ceased to provide straw, and they had to 
u find it M as best they could, while they succeeded 
in getting only " stubble for straw." What a con- 
firmation there is here of the truth of the Mosaic 
record ! 

The other store-city, Eaamses, has not yet been 
discovered, but a statue of its builder has been 
found. It is a colossal figure weighing four hun- 
dred tons, having been cut from a single block of 
stone. This bears upon its girdle the name of 
Barneses the Second (or Great). Fragments of 
another still larger statue of this monarch have 
been found here and there, and we are informed 
that if the scattered pieces were put together they 
would make an image ninety feet high, with a 
weight of nine hundred tons. On so large a scale 
did Eameses build, and he built by his Hebrew 
slaves Pithom which has actually been unearthed, 
and Raamses, bearing his name and likely yet to be 
brought to light. 

But why speak of his statues and monuments when 
we have the king himself? Among the mummies 
lately unrolled was that of the Pharaoh who knew 
not Joseph. Eameses, the Pharaoh of the Oppres- 



130 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

simi, adorns the museum at Boolak. His funeral 
alia, the cerements of death, the successive band- 
ages were removed in the presence of a distin- 
guished company of Egyptians, Turks, English- 
men and representatives of other nations. Amid 
breathless attention the old tyrant was unwrapt, 
and, entirely stripped, the great oppressor of the 
Israelites lay before those at whose mercy he was 
more completely even than were at his mercy the 
Hebrews whose lives he made so bitter in the brick- 
yards. We feel the reality of the oppression which 
drove the Israelites into rebellion when we can look 
upon the great oppressor himself. It gives us solid 
satisfaction to see his poor mummy examined to-day 
as a curiosity. 

We can look without a fear upon his forehead, 
described as "low and narrow;" his eyebrows, 
"thick and white;" his small eyes; his aquiline 
nose ; his ears, pierced for the wearing of jewelry ; 
his broad shoulders ; and his tall frame, over six 
feet in height. We can go to Egypt and see all 
this — gaze upon the great Barneses. Or if we can- 
not take the trip to the distant land of the Nile, we 
can at least get a photograph of this ancient mon- 
arch. Our very newspapers contain cuts of his 
mummied head and shoulders. Let some modern 
brick maker adopt his face as a trade-mark to be 
stamped upon the plastic clay, and the revenges 
of time, or rather of Divine Providence, will be 
complete. The mummied remains of the oppressor, 



THE BIBLE AND THE PHABAOHS. 131 

Rameses, are among the " signs and wonders upon 
Pharaoh " " as it is this day." These are no an- 
cient, but they are modern, Egyptian miracles al- 
most. The truth in the case of the Pharaohs of 
the Bible is stranger than fiction. 

4. The Pharaoh of the Exodus itself has not yet 
been found. We know who he was. He was a 
son of Rarneses, and was called Menephtah the 
First. Very significantly, a monument of his in 
the Berlin Museum speaks of the sudden and mel- 
ancholy death of a son of his. Could this calam- 
ity have occurred when every house in Egypt 
mourned its first-born except where the blood 
was sprinkled on the doorposts? 

Is it all a myth about the ten plagues ? Herod- 
otus even speaks of a judgment visited upon 
Menephtah. Says the father of historians of this 
monarch : " He impiously hurled a spear into the 
overflowing waves of the river, which a sudden 
wind caused to rise to an unusual height ;" and for 
this defiance of Deity he was smitten with a ten 
years' blindness. So that, according to this pagan 
writer, there was at least one plague inflicted upon 
this Pharaoh ; and indeed the plagues were ten if 
the number of years be taken into account. From 
this Greek source he is seen to have had just the 
spirit, proud and imperious, which the Pharaoh of 
the Exodus had. 

But where is his mummy to confirm the Bible 
story regarding his career? It has not yet been 



132 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

found, and perhaps never will be, for all his host 
was overthrown in the Red Sea, and he himself 
may also have perished thus, for "there remained 
not bo much as one of them," and the Psalmist 
Bays God "overthrew Pharaoh and his host in the 
Red Sea." To be sure, his body may have been 
recovered and embalmed, and perhaps, as some 
biblical scholars maintain, he himself was not 
drowned at all, the scriptural expression being 
simply one of the common universals; but it is 
at least significant that though we have the mummy 
of his father and grandfather, his is missing. His 
unembalmed body may be lying at the bottom of 
the Red Sea. The very absence, therefore, of the 
mummy of the Pharaoh of the Exodus is confirm- 
atory of God's word. His absence from the mu- 
seum on the banks of the Nile is as significant as the 
presence of others. "Signs and wonders upon 
Pharaoh" " as it is this day " ! That vacant niche 
at Boolak is a sign and wonder. 

5. Among the most natural of mummied faces 
lately brought to light is that of Pinotem the Sec- 
ond, whose portrait appears in Harper's Monthly 
for July, 1882. The mummies of his wife and 
infant child are also among the recent discoveries. 
The babe, only sixteen inches long and reposing in 
the same sarcophagus as the queen, tells the sad 
Btory of their deaths, perhaps three thousand years 
ago. The little one barely saw the light of earth, 
and then lay down with the mother in the long 



THE BIBLE AND THE PHARAOHS. 133 

sleep of death. There is pathos in such revela- 
tions. 

Now, some scholars identify Pinotem with the 
Pharaoh whose daughter Solomon married. If 
this be correct j we may say with the honorary sec- 
retary of the Egypt Exploration Fund (Amelia B. 
Edwards), and therefore eminent authority, " It is 
surely a strange subject for reflection that while 
Solomon and all his glories have passed away, the 
father, mother and infant sister of his Egyptian 
bride may be seen to this day under a glass case 
in the Boolak Museum." This is only re-echoing 
Scripture : " signs and wonders upon Pharaoh " " as 
it is this day." 

Finally, what further signs and wonders God has 
in store for the strengthening of our faith we do not 
know. Jacob was " embalmed " in Egypt, and he 
was laid away in the cave of Machpelah. Not 
since the Mohammedan possession of this sacred 
place nor within the memory of man has any one 
been admitted to the innermost part of the cave. 
If entrance ever should be gained thereto in the 
innermost shrine, said Dean Stanley, u one at least 
of the patriarchal family may possibly still repose 
intact — the embalmed body of Jacob." 

So, too, the " bones" of Joseph, which were so 
carefully preserved in Egypt during the long sojourn 
of his descendants there — those bones concerning 
which he gave commandment at his death that at 
the departure of the Israelites for the promised land 



184 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

they should be taken along — those bones which 
were carried up and down for forty years in the 
wilderness, and which were subsequently interred by 
Joshua at Shechem, to be transferred, possibly at a 
later date, according to the Mussulman tradition, 
to the cave of Machpelah, — those "bones" of Jo- 
seph, his embalmed body, may yet be found. Just 
as strange things have happened in the discovery 
of the mummy of the Pharaoh who " knew not 
Joseph." 

But signs and wonders enough we have had to 
make us see the truth of religion and of the Bible, and 
to make us realize the vanity of all that is earthly. 
Of the four to seven hundred million mummies re- 
posing in the sandy soil of Egypt, we have been 
looking at only a few ; but surely these have been 
sufficient to impress us with the thought of human 
mortality. Soon we all shall be sleeping in the 
dust of the earth, and centuries hence our bones 
may be lying in museums. The " signs and won- 
ders upon Pharaoh" "as it is this day" should 
teach us the solemn lesson of the frailty of our 
bodies, and should lead us to give due attention to 
the immortal part. During the thirty to forty cen- 
turies through which the mummies of the Pharaohs 
have come down to us, — during this long sleep of 
physical death the Pharaohs themselves, their im- 
mortal spirits, have been living somewhere. When 
not forty but a thousand and a million centuries of 
eternity have rolled away, our souls will still be 



THE BIBLE AND THE PHARAOHS. 135 



in existence. How impressive the fact of such a 
sweep of centuries ! Let us prepare for the endless 
future, for God will get him a name upon all who 
are enemies to spiritual Israel, and who deal proudly 
against the Church of Christ founded on apostles 
and prophets. 



CHAPTER X. 

ELEVATING INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE. 

" Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, 
And light unto my path. — Ps. 119 : 105. 

WHEREVER the Bible goes it dissipates dark- 
ness. Its elevating influence is unquestioned. 
Let a traveler in a wild, forsaken coucitry put up 
for the night in an out-of-the-way, suspicious-look- 
ing house, and he might feel uneasy about his life 
and money. But let the good old Book be taken 
down, and let the head of the family reverently 
read therefrom in evening worship, and one would 
fear no longer; he would go to his rest with a 
feeling of perfect safety. An anecdote is related 
of some skeptical sailors, of their being wrecked 
on an isle of the sea, and of how they were afraid 
of being eaten by cannibals till some of them, 
creeping cautiously from the shore to the top of a 
hill, saw in the valley below the spire of a Christian 
church, whereupon they leaped to their feet, and 
railed to their fellows that it was all right. Why 
that sudden sense of security? Because even those 
infidels knew that where the Bible and the church 
Were, manners would be humanized. These are 

136 



ELEVATING INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE. 137 

practical tests to show the real divineness of the 
Scriptures. Now let us note the elevating influence 
of the Bible along certain great lines. 

1. Not to discuss the gradual undermining of 
slavery since the introduction of New-Testament 
ideas of brotherhood, till, instead of two bondmen 
to one freeman throughout the Roman empire at 
the advent of Christ, human bondage is now 
practically extinct throughout Christendom, — with 
this barest allusion, passing over a recognized ref- 
ormation that has been wrought by scriptural 
teaching along the line of individual liberty, mark 
the change that has taken place with reference to 
childhood. Every reader of classical literature is 
acquainted with the ancient practice of exposing 
infants. Paris, who abducted the beautiful Helen 
and thus brought on the Trojan war, was in infancy 
abandoned on Mount Ida. Romulus and Remus, 
the founders of the Eternal City, were, according to 
the traditional story, thrown into the Tiber. Plato, 
in stating his doctrine of the community of families, 
says : " Their children are also common, and no 
parent is to know his child nor any child his 
parent." And what was to be the disposition of 
the little ones in the ideal republic ? Why, this : 
" The proper officers will take the offspring of the 
good parents to the pen or fold, and there they will 
deposit them with certain nurses who dwell in a 
separate quarter ; but the offspring of the inferior, 
or of the better when they chance to be deformed, 



138 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

they will conceal in some mysterious, unknown 
place. Decency will be respected." That is from 
Plato, whom Joseph Cook places among the celes- 
tials. Then nursing-mothers were to be taken to 
the fold under such precautions as to prevent any 
recognition of their own children. 

But most to be pitied were the poor waifs who 
were cast out to be the victims of the weather or 
of wild beast, or to be reared for slavery, and often 
the brothel, by any who might choose to bring 
them up to years of maturity. Aristotle advocated 
the inhuman custom of exposure. " Let it be the 
law," he said, " that nothing imperfect or maimed 
shall be brought up." Plutarch mentions " a sort 
of chasm " into which helpless infants were cast. 

When the great Roman general Germanicus died, 
the event was commemorated by imposing civic 
and religious rites, and among the honors to the 
renowned dead were, says Suetonius the Latin 
historian, " new-born infants exposed." How dif- 
ferent from the part taken by children in connection 
with the death of General Grant, upon whose 
coffin was affectionately laid by them a wreath of 
oak-leaves which they had gathered out of the 
woods, and which by direction of the family was 
proudly carried in the great funeral procession in 
New York, in one of the grandest pageants the 
world has ever witnessed ! 

What a transformation Christianity has wrought 
in the estimation placed upon childhood! Ever 



ELEVATING INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE. 139 

since the Babe of Bethlehem was cradled in a 
manger, and ever since as a man he said, " of such 
is the kingdom/' little children have been more 
honored and more tenderly loved and nurtured. 
The parental relation has been dearer ; motherhood 
has meant a great deal more. Unlike Plato's 
republic, which was inimical to childhood, unlike 
the pagan world generally with its exposure of 
infants, the millennium of Scripture is when " a 
little child shall lead them/' while of the New Je- 
rusalem the prophet says, " And the streets of the 
city shall be full of boys and girls playing in the 
streets thereof." Such instructions, coming with the 
authority of inspiration, have revolutionized public 
sentiment relative to infancy and childhood. 

2. The Bible has also elevated woman. Grecian 
and Roman womanhood is not to be admired. To 
be sure, there were some pure and beautiful charac- 
ters. Greece boasted a Penelope, who accepted the 
proposal of marriage from Ulysses by covering her 
face with a veil to hide her blushes, and who re- 
jected all suitors during the twenty years' absence 
of her husband at the Trojan War, remaining 
faithful in the hope of his return, in which she was 
not disappointed. Rome, too, had a Cornelia, who 
in an early widowhood refused many advantageous 
offers (one from a king) that she might devote her- 
self entirely to her children ; and when a caller 
desired to see her jewelry, in her two boys, invited 
in for the purpose, she showed " her jewels." But 



1 10 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

these are solitary examples. The prevailing type 
of womanhood was that of worldliness and wicked- 
ness, with no high aim in life. Dress and dinner- 
party, theatre and circus, absorbed the feminine 
attention. 

A wife of Caligula the emperor on one wedding 
occasion wore a set of emeralds worth two millions 
of dollars. One of the wives of Nero, says Pliny, 
"was accustomed to have her daintier mules shod 
with gold." In the train of such unnatural ex- 
travagance followed immoralities and infidelities 
which finally broke up the family and destroyed 
the state. 

The biblical idea of wedlock, the divine order 
of things, is indicated by the one man and one 
woman placed in Eden. God evidently intended 
marriage to be monogamous. Polygamy sprang 
up, and was practiced even by Old-Testament 
saints, but this was a departure from the original 
intent, and was expressly attributed to the hardness 
of the people's hearts by Christ, who restored the 
marriage relation to its primeval condition, making 
again the twain one. 

Turn now to Greece, and what was its ideal re- 
lation between man and woman? Let Plato, the 
greatest of its moral philosophers, answer. In the 
portrayal of his model republic, in the description* 
of his Utopia, he proposes a community of wives. 
u Ajb among other animals, so also among men," is 
the exact wording of the plan. We stand aghast 



ELEVATING INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE. 141 

at the proposition, and especially when he writes 
calmly of improving the race after the manner of 
the methods pursued with " hunting-dogs" and 
"birds." With such teaching from the highest 
sources it is not strange that the prominent women 
of Greece, the companions of statesmen and phil- 
osophers, were the Aspasias and Phrynes, persons 
who would not be tolerated in decent society at 
present. Such at that time had their witty sayings 
collected, and statues were erected to their memory 
by an admiring public. The wife, on the contrary, 
sank into obscurity. She was relegated to practical 
slavery. She was made to feel her inferiority. " Is 
there a human being," asks Socrates, " with whom 
you talk less than with your wife ?" And he used 
to go and talk with one of the women of the town. 
Perhaps Xantippe was not altogether to blame for 
her exhibitions of temper. 

In Rome it was no better. There had once been 
domestic excellence. Indeed, the claim was that 
there were no divorces for the first five hundred 
years of Roman history. But in the first century 
of our era such a state of innocence was only a dim 
and distant memory, and hence Juvenal says : 

" Yes, I believe that chastity was known 
And prized on earth while Saturn filled the throne, 
When rocks a bleak and scanty shelter gave, 
When sheep and shepherds thronged one common cave, 
And when the mountain-wife her couch bestrewed 
With skins of beasts, joint tenants of the wood, 
And reeds, and leaves plucked from the neighboring tree." 



143 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

He had reason for such a lamentation, since, accord- 
ing to his testimony, the nuptial garlands were not 
faded often till marriage had given place to divorce, 
and since 1 one woman could have had this truthful 
inscription on her tomb, "eight husbands in five 
year*" Cicero divorced his wife with whom he 
had lived thirty years, and married a young woman 
of wealth, whom in turn he discarded. Martial, 
who was born a few years after the Saviour's death, 
mentions in one of his epigrams a woman who mar- 
ried her tenth husband within a month. Seneca, 
contemporary with Paul, makes the astounding 
declaration that there are " distinguished women 
of noble families " who " reckon their years not by 
the number of the consuls, but by that of their hus- 
bands." Of course the wife sank under such cir- 
cumstances. She became unworthy of notice. Not 
so very incredible, therefore, is the information 
given by Plutarch of a member of the Senate ex- 
pelled from that body " because," such is the his- 
torian's precise language, "in the presence of his 
daughter and in open day he had kissed his wife." 
The lordly Roman, no more than the Grecian, 
would not have approved of the sentiment of 
Scripture : 

" Her husband also, and he praiseth her, saying, 
Many daughters have done virtuously, 
But thou excellest them all." 

According to the pagan idea, the wife was to receive 






ELEVATING INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE. 143 

no appreciative word or caress. She was to be kept 
suitably humble. By cold neglect she was to be 
taught her lower position in the scale of being. 
Then in the name of a hospitable friendship be- 
tween families, and under the form of religious 
worship within the very temples, prevailed the 
most abominable practices, of which it would be a 
shame even to speak. The conjugal relation was 
thus destroyed, divorces became easy and immoral- 
ity swept away the family. 

Christianity wrought a great transformation. It 
elevated women to companionship. Our Lord did 
not disdain their ministrations. He honored them 
by appearing to them first after the resurrection. 
Paul rejoiced to find in them his first converts, and 
taught that there was in Christianity neither male 
nor female. They felt a new dignity in being thus 
recognized, and they rose under the encouragement 
step by step, until Libanius, the cultured friend of 
the apostate emperor Julian, once exclaimed, "What 
women there are among the Christians !" Such 
was the judgment of even a pagan as to the ele- 
vating influence of Bible-teaching upon woman- 
hood. 

3. Consider next how nations have been lifted 
by the religion of the Bible from barbarism. 
"Wherever the Scriptures are read, and only there, 
do we see a high order of civilization. Take Eu- 
ropean countries, and we find enlightenment graded 
according to the knowledge that each has of God's 



141 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

word. Heathen nations begin to wake up intellect- 
ually and commercially as soon as they are given the 
Scriptures. The Sandwich Islands and Madagascar 
are striking examples of the elevating influence of 
the Bible. Nor will it do to attribute the changed 
condition of things to the general spirit of progress. 
Let a mining-town in the very midst of civilization 
be for a succession of years without the preached 
word, and how soon the people degenerate, until 
there is a reign of terror, of gambling, of drunk- 
enness, of lust, of anarchy ! But let the gospel be 
introduced, and communities begin improving; and 
it is the same with nations. 

Let us trace the development under biblical 
teaching of a single great nation, the English. 
"When Caesar landed in Britain, 55 B. c, he found 
the inhabitants to be savages, with " clothing of 
skins." Sometimes they were not as richly attired 
as that even, for, in the language of Cowper, 

" Time was when clothing sumptuous or for use, 
Save their own painted skins, our sires had none." 

When the Roman general Suetonius about 60 
A. B. proposed to conquer Britain, he was surprised 
at the wild appearance of the natives lining the 
shore and ready to fight. Women mingled with 
the soldiers, and, swinging their flaming torches 
and tossing their disheveled hair, they ran back- 
ward and forward and shrieked like incarnate 
fiends. The Britons were nothing less than savage 



ELEVATING INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE. 145 

tribes. Their religion was the veriest superstition. 
Sometimes their priests, the Druids, offered up hu- 
man victims to the imaginary deities. How could 
people be reclaimed from such degradation ? Why, 
the religion of the Bible was introduced, and, says 
Hume himself, they made great " advances toward 
arts and civil manners." 

But just as they began to emerge from their bar- 
barism there came apparent disaster in the immi- 
gration of a new and less-civilized element into the 
country. In the fifth century hordes of barbarians 
from the German forests crossed the sea and estab- 
lished themselves in Britain. These Angles and 
Saxons divided the country up among themselves 
into seven separate kingdoms. Who were these 
Anglo-Saxons, from whom, as well as from the 
Britons, we are descended? They were heathen 
tribes which fought each other, much as our Indians 
have done. Fighting was their main occupation 
for several generations, but their contests were of 
so little account as hardly to deserve historical men- 
tion. Indeed, Milton, according to Hume, says 
"that the skirmishes of kites and crows as much 
merited a particular narrative as the confused trans- 
actions and battles of the Saxon Heptarchy f and 
the historian Knight speaks of their fierce hostilities 
and treacherous alliances affecting us " little more 
than the wars and truces of Choctaws and Chero- 
kees." 

Such were the Anglo-Saxons, who were below 
10 



146 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

the Britons even in point of civilization. They 
nearly extirpated the Christian religion, thereby 
causing the country to revert, says Hume, to its 
"ancient barbarity." Macaulay refers to their 
coarseness in his allusion to their " huge piles 
of food and hogsheads of strong drink." They 
had but little more refinement than brutes. All 
that was fair about them was their physical features. 
They had long flaxen hair and blooming counte- 
nances, but mentally, socially and' morally they 
were very inferior, and the cultivated Roman 
looked upon them about as we look upon the 
negroes of Central Africa. Indeed, these heathen 
ancestors of ours were bought and sold as slaves, 
as the Africans have been in later times. 

Connected with this fact is the familiar but ever- 
romantic story of what led to their evangelization 
and civilization. A pious abbot was strolling along 
the streets of Rome. He stopped at the market- 
place to witness the sales. Some slaves were on the 
auction-block, and he was struck by their fresh, 
beautiful faces, and when, upon inquiring their 
nationality, he was told that they were Angles, he 
replied with that famous pun which has come down 
the centuries, that they would more properly be de- 
nominated angels ; and he was interested at once in 
their religious welfare. When he afterward sat on 
the pontifical throne as Gregory the Great he re- 
solved to send missionaries to them in their distant 
island home. 



ELEVATING INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE. 147 

That is the kind of ancestors we had, and if it 
had not been for the cause of Christian or foreign 
missions we would be sitting in pagan darkness, 
for their religion was gross beyond conception. 
They had numerous gods, to whom they sacrificed 
not only animals, but human beings. Their chief 
deity was the god of war, and hence the better 
fighters they were the more religious they were. 
Their idea of Paradise was that of a vast hall where 
they could recline on couches and drink ale from the 
skulls of their slain enemies. 

But the religion of the Bible was carried to these 
debased Anglo-Saxons. One of their chiefs, King 
Ethelbert of Kent, had married a French princess 
who was a Christian, and Queen Bertha was allowed 
the free exercise of her religion. This was the 
opportune time chosen by Gregory, but when his 
forty missionaries, headed by Augustine, got as far 
as France, they heard such frightful things about 
those to whom they were going, fearful as the sto- 
ries of modern cannibalism, that they begged to be 
released from the perilous mission. They, however, 
were urged to proceed with their lives in their 
hands, and they did brave the peril. When they 
reached Britain (597 A. D.) they sought an audience 
with King Ethelbert of Kent. The cautious mon- 
arch received them in the open air, lest they should 
influence him by some sort of magic. He kept 
them at a safe distance. He guarded against being 
mesmerized or bewitched by the strange foreigners, 



148 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

who, however, gradually disarmed him of fear and 
gained his confidence, till eventually he became a 
convert to Christianity, his wife's religion. Thus 
was the gospel introduced again among our pagan 
ancestors, and even the great infidel historian of 
England pronounces this event " the most memor- 
able" in the reign of that king. The leaven spread 
to the other divisions of the Heptarchy, and in 664 
A. D. a union was brought about between the 
various branches of the Anglo-Saxon Church ; and 
this prepared the way for that political union in 
827 A. D., when, under Egbert, the seven independ- 
ent kingdoms were consolidated and the united 
country was first called Angle-land — that is, Eng- 
land — and the English race started on its march of 
amazing progress. 

What lifted those warring tribes out of heathen- 
ism and developed and cemented them into a great 
people ? The Bible. Into Britons and Anglo-Sax- 
ons life from above was breathed, and the mightiest, 
grandest people of all history sprung into being. 
Every new incursion of Danes or Normans was 
taken up under the power of the gospel and uti- 
lized as fresh blood to be sent coursing through the 
body politic. There have been revolutions now 
and then, but these have been only the eruptions 
which have left the nation healthier and stronger. 
Territory has been added to territory, till English- 
speaking people to-day control a scope of country 
simply colossal in extent, the sun never setting on 



ELEVATING INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE. 149 

the worldwide dominion and England's drum-beat 
being literally heard around the globe. Art, science, 
civilization and Christianity keep pace with the 
onward movement of this great political power. 
Isaiah grows eloquent over the little one becoming 
a thousand, and the small one a strong nation, 
through the Lord's hastening, and he breaks out, 
" Who are these that fly as a cloud, and as the 
doves to their windows ? Surely the isles shall 
wait for Me, and the ships of Tarshish first." The 
prophet seems almost to have seen the white-sailed 
fleets of the British isles riding proudly every sea, 
speeding over vast expanses of water with the rapid 
flight of white doves before a storm, and with the 
velocity of the cloud borne swiftly along by cy- 
clonic wind. Out of savage Britons and heathen 
Anglo-Saxons, out of piratical Danes and semi- 
civilized Normans, has been wrought by the religion 
of the Bible that which we do see. God's word has 
been the lamp and light by which this national 
progress has been made. To whatever nation it 
goes it has the same elevating influence, and even 
Parwin, after seeing the transformation wrought by 
the gospel on certain isles of the sea, became a reg- 
ular contributor to the cause, and testified, " The 
lesson of the missionary is that of the enchanter's 
wand." Let, then, this magical book be sent around 
the globe. Glad are we that it has been rendered 
into three hundred and sixty tongues and dialects 
by the British and American Bible societies, and 



150 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

let there be no halt in the good work till the 
"blest volume" has been carried in the vernac- 
ular to every kindred, every tribe, on this terres- 
trial ball. 



CHAPTER XI. 

THE BIBLE AND THE GOLDEN CITY OF 
BABYLON. 

" The golden city ceased."— Isa. 14 : 4. 

THE reference is to Babylon, and let us see 
how the word of God regarding it has been 
fulfilled. There is no more fascinating subject 
than the agreements of history and prophecy. The 
faith must be strengthened when prophets foretold 
events whose actual occurrence historians relate 
hundreds of years afterward. Babylon is only 
one of many illustrations of the exact correspond- 
ence between scriptural prediction and historical 
fact. 

The former glory of the city and its present 
desolation can hardly be overstated. It is well 
described by Isaiah as the " golden city" and as 
" the lady of kingdoms " and as the " beauty of 
the Chaldeans' pride." Herodotus, two hundred 
and fifty years later and an eye-witness, says : " Its 
extent, its beauty and its magnificence surpass all 
that has come within my knowledge." According 
to this writer, it was laid out in a square each of 
whose sides was fifteen miles in length. That 

161 



152 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

makes a grand total of two hundred and twenty- 
live square miles, whereas London has only one 
hundred and twenty-two square miles, and New 
York only forty-one. Chicago itself, with its one 
hundred and seventy-four square miles since the 
recent annexations which make it the largest city 
in area in the world, is not so large as ancient 
Babylon was. 

The glory of the city was augmented in that, 
according to a Roman historian (Quintus Rufus 
Curtius), nine-tenths of all the enclosed space con- 
sisted of gardens and meadows and parks. It was 
even said to contain tillable land enough to support 
its inhabitants in a time of siege. It was a great 
country-city. Its streets crossed each other at right 
angles, and were one hundred and fifty feet broad, 
and were lined with elegant residences three and 
four stories high. 

Its political supremacy was once such that Jere- 
miah could call it the " hammer of the whole earth," 
to " break in pieces " whatever it smote. When 
the Mohammedans in the eighth century swept over 
Spain, and were moving on to the conquest of Eu- 
rope, there met the hitherto invincible Moslems a 
hero who dealt such sturdy blows that he has ever 
since been known as Charles Martel, which, being 
interpreted, is " Charles the Hammer." The vigor 
of his arm beat back the Saracen power and saved 
Christendom. He struck hard and gained a proud 
title, which, however, Babylon centuries before had 



THE BIBLE AND BABYLON. 153 

won in that it was called the " hammer of the whole 
earth." 

But what was to be the fate of this strong and 
beautiful city ? Hear the language of Jeremiah : 
"And Babylon shall become heaps, a dwelling- 
place for jackals, an astonishment, and an hissing, 
without inhabitant." No less explicit was Isaiah, 
who said, "It shall never be inhabited, neither 
shall it be dwelt in from generation to generation : 
neither shall the Arabian pitch tent there ; neither 
shall shepherds make their flocks to lie down there. 
But wild beasts of the desert shall lie there ; and 
their houses shall be full of doleful creatures ; and 
ostriches shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance 
there. And wolves shall cry in their castles, and 
jackals in the pleasant palaces." Has this utter 
forsakenness overtaken the golden city ? As early 
as 20 b. c, Strabo speaks of the site of Babylon 
as a " vast desolation." Jerome in the fourth cen- 
tury of our era declares that it was the hunting- 
ground of the Persian monarchs. Bawlinson in 
his Ancient Monarchies says : " Vast heaps or 
mounds, shapeless and unsightly, are scattered 
at intervals over the entire region where it is 
certain that Babylon anciently stood." Do you 
wish the testimony of an eminent archaeologist 
who has personally been on the ground and ex- 
plored the ruins ? " The site of Babylon," says 
Layard, "is a naked and hideous waste." "Owls," 
he says, "start from the scanty thickets, and the 



1 5 1 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

foul jackal stalks through the furrows." An 
English consul (C. J. Rich, 1811) testifies: "There 
arc many dens of wild beasts in various parts, iu 
one of which I found the bones of sheep and other 
animals, and perceived a strong smell like that of 
a lion. I also found quantities of porcupine-quills, 
and in most of the cavities are numbers of bats and 
owls." Verily the golden city has ceased ! • 

If we enter into details, we shall see the same 
wonderful verification of the word spoken of old 
by the Lord. There is not merely a general, but 
there is a specific, fulfillment of the prophetic. 

1. One of the marked features of Babylon was 
its system of irrigation. Through the centre of 
the city flowed the Euphrates, a river a quarter of 
a mile wide, " and its depth such," said Xenophon, 
" that of two men standing, the one upon the other, 
the uppermost would not appear above the water. 
So that the river afforded a better defense to the 
city than its walls." Canals, broad and sometimes 
navigable, were cut in every direction. An im- 
mense artificial lake was dug west of the city. 
This was thirty-five feet deep and one hundred and 
sixty miles in circuit, or forty miles square. Into 
this the whole river could be turned if at any time 
a dry river-bed was desired for mechanical con- 
-t ructions. Very properly was the city thus 
addressed by Jeremiah: "O thou that dwellest 
upon many waters/' while the Jewish captives said 
plaintively, 



THE BIBLE AND BABYLON. 155 

" By the rivers of Babylon, 
There we sat down, yea, we wept, 
When we remembered Zion." 

But what said Jehovah of this extensive system of 
irrigation ? — " I will dry up her sea, and make her 
fountain dry." Long ago Diodorus, of the age of 
the first Caesars, referred to the canals being filled 
with alluvial deposits, while what had been a fertile 
garden was converted into a marsh ; and it remains 
to this day, according to the modern traveler, a 
"desert," no longer blossoming as the rose. 

2. Take, again, those walls which Herodotus 
says were over three hundred feet high and over 
eighty feet wide — those walls upon which, between 
the battlements, four-horse chariots could meet and 
pass without colliding. Consider also those hun- 
dred gates of brass which the father of historians 
mentions. Surely such substantial works would 
endure. Nay, Jeremiah cries, "her walls are 
thrown down." This prophet is still more definite 
when he says, " The broad walls of Babylon shall 
be utterly overthrown, and her high gates shall be 
burned with fire." Have those splendid fortifica- 
tions survived in spite of Heaven's malediction? 
Listen to a recent visitor (Bishop J. P. Newman) 
to these historic scenes : " To-day can be seen, and 
only here and there, low, shapeless, detached mounds 
where once the proud walls stood." Our very 
Bible Dictionary says : " Babylon has been a quarry 
from which all the tribes in the vicinity have 



156 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

perpetually derived the bricks with which they 
have built their cities." The fortifications are all 
gone. 

3. But there was a massive temple in the city. 
Has it, like the Pantheon of Rome, come down to 
the present? 

It is Herodotus who tells us of a temple of the 
god Bel eight stories high, with a winding staircase 
running around the outside clear to the top, which 
was surmounted by statues, one of them forty feet 
in height. Here treasures are said to have accu- 
mulated to the estimated value of more than six 
hundred millions of dollars. Here, we learn from 
the sacred historian, were stored the vessels taken 
from Jerusalem, for the record reads, " Nebuchad- 
nezzar also carried off the vessels of the house of 
the Lord to Babylon, and put them in his temple at 
Babylon." This may have been the tower of 
Babel, which, you recollect, was to " reach unto 
heaven," and, though it was not completed at the 
time on account of the confusion of tongues, it 
appears to have been a cherished project afterward, 
for Isaiah seems to have it in mind when he 
represents Babylon as saying, " I will ascend into 
heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of 
God." This temple of Bel is described by Herod- 
otus, who makes it rise to the height of six hundred 
feet, which is higher than St. Peter's at Rome (four 
hundred and forty-eight feet), or St. PauPs at 
London (four hundred and four feet), or the Ca- 



THE BIBLE AN I) BABYLON. 157 

thedral at Strasburg (four hundred and sixty-one 
feet), or the Capitol at Washington (three hundred 
and fifty feet), or the Washington Monument (five 
hundred and fifty-five feet) ; it is surpassed in height 
only by the Eiffel Tower at Paris, which springs 
into the air one thousand feet. 

What says prophecy of this imposing structure 
of old devoted to the degrading and licentious wor- 
ship of the god Bel ? Jeremiah exclaims, " Baby- 
lon is taken, Bel is put to shame "j " And I will do 
judgment upon Bel in Babylon, and I will bring 
forth out of his mouth that which he hath swallowed 
up." Did this receiver of rich treasures have to 
disgorge ? Herodotus says that Xerxes plundered 
this temple. Ezra says, " And the gold and silver 
vessels also of the house of God, which Nebuchad- 
nezzar took out of the temple that was at Jerusalem, 
and brought them into the temple of Babylon, 
those did Cyrus the king take out of the temple of 
Babylon." Some at least of the six hundred mil- 
lions of treasures which had been swallowed up 
were taken by Xerxes, and the holy vessels which 
had been swallowed up were removed at the com- 
mand of Cyrus and restored to Jerusalem. Well 
did Isaiah prophesy, "Bel boweth down," while 
Jeremiah declared, " Though Babylon should mount 
up to heaven, and though she should fortify the 
height of her strength, yet from me shall spoilers 
come unto her, saith the Lord ; " and it was even 
so. Not even the completed tower of Babel, not 



158 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

this temple of Bel with its eight stories tower- 
ing up to an altitude of nearly six hundred feet, 
ii. i even tliis splendid edifice of the golden city, 
could resist the decree of God, for the traveler of 
to-day (Bishop Newman) sees it in the mound, Birs 
Nimroud, " rising suddenly out of the desert plain, 
a riven, fragmentary, blasted pile," looming "up a 
vast mass of shapeless ruins, as when, by some 
mighty convulsion of nature, temples are thrown 
on temples and towers are piled on towers." Such 
are the words of one who has been an observer 
of what he so vividly portrays. Verily Bel ex- 
alted to heaven has bowed down. So utter was 
the ruin that when Alexander the Great visited 
it he employed ten thousand men two months to 
clear away the rubbish preparatory to rebuilding, 
and then the task was abandoned while yet a 
beginning had scarcely been made. 

4. The palace of Nebuchadnezzar (the modern 
Kasr) has fared no better — the palace whose outer 
circumference w T as six miles, whose inner walls were 
of colored bricks upon which were depicted such 
hunting-scenes as a man thrusting his spear through 
a lion and a woman on horseback hurling her lance 
at a leopard — fitting representations for a city 
founded by Nimrod the mighty hunter. 

Within this palace w r ere the famous "hanging 

dens," covering three and a half acres, erected 

by the king for his homesick queen, who had come 

from a mountainous country and who longed for 



THE BIBLE AND BABYLON. 159 

the hills of her native land. She had an artificial 
hill made for her with a succession of terraces, each 
watered by machinery drawing the supply up from 
the Euphrates, and distributing it to delicate flowers 
and to enormous trees rooted in hollow piers filled 
with mould. By marble steps the queen could ascend 
this mountain, which towered above the high walls 
in the most picturesque manner ; she could recline 
during the heat of the day in romantic arbors on 
the hillside. Like Xero's celebrated Golden House, 
which contained within its spacious area cornfields, 
woods and a lake, Nebuchadnezzar's palace contained 
a mountain. 

It may have been here where Nebuchadnezzar 
walked and viewed the city when he said, " Is not 
this great Babylon which I have built for the royal 
dwelling-place by the might of my power and for 
the glory of my majesty ?" It was for his impiety 
on this occasion that he was stricken with insanity, 
to wander for a while a lunatic, perhaps on this 
very mountain, his body wet with the dew of 
heaven, his hair grown like eagles' feathers, his 
nails like birds' claws, while he ate grass as oxen. 
It was probably in this palace with its hanging 
gardens that Belshazzar feasted a thousand of his 
lords, and saw on the wall, not a hunting-scene, but 
the fingers of a man's hand writing his death- 
sentence. It may have been here where Daniel 
faced both these great monarchs, and told them 
boldly of their sins; and to commemorate possibly 



160 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

his rescue from the den of lions he may have seen 
in some conspicuous spot the still-existing sculptured 
lion, about thirteen feet long and ten feet high, 
.standing over a prostrate man with outstretched 
arms ; he may have seen this great work of art 
which has been unearthed in these latter days. 
Grander than the temple of Bel was this palace with 
its artificial mountain, which the Greeks called one 
of the seven wonders of the world. 

And did prophecy doom this to destruction ? It 
is Jeremiah who speaks thus in the name of the 
Lord : " Behold, I am against thee, O destroying 
mountain, saith the Lord, which destroyest all the 
earth : and I will stretch out mine hand upon thee, 
and roll thee down from the rocks, and I will 
make thee a burnt mountain." Such was the pre- 
diction. What is the fact according to present 
explorations ? The one from whom we have quoted 
before, and who has stood on the very site of the 
once superb palace, says : " Everywhere were shape- 
less mounds, covered with fragments of glass, 
marble, pottery, and inscribed bricks, mingled with 
a white nitrous soil whose blanched appearance 
completed the picture of desolation." 

5. Once more, the very method of the city's 
capture, which led to its final destruction, is fore- 
told. Isaiah says, " Desolation shall come upon 
thee suddenly, which thou knowest not " ; " Thus 
saith the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus, . . . The 
gates shall not be shut. . . . And I will give thee 



THE BIBLE AND BABYLON. 161 

the treasures of darkness." Jeremiah says, "I 
have laid a snare for thee, and thou art also taken, 
O Babylon, and thou wast not aware " ; " Surely I 
will fill thee with men, as with the canker-worm ; 
and they shall lift up a shout against thee " ; " One 
post shall run to meet another, and one messenger 
to meet another, to show the king of Babylon that 
his city is taken in every quarter : and the passages 
are surprised ; " " And I will make drunk her 
princes and wise men, her governors and her 
deputies, and her mighty men ; and they shall 
sleep a perpetual sleep, and not wake." Such are 
the predictions uttered more than a hundred years 
before Babylon fell. 

What are the facts? Whether Cyrus himself 
was the divine instrument, or — which is more 
probable — whether, as Professor Ladd claims, " the 
name of Cyrus in Isaiah is used as a title of the 
Persian monarchs in general," and whether thus, 
as is likely, Darius was the one who took the city 
by the well-known stratagem, — Eawlinson the his- 
torian gives the substantial facts as follows : " When 
all was prepared Cyrus determined to wait for the 
arrival of a certain festival, during which the 
whole populace were wont to engage in drinking 
and reveling, and then silently in the dead of night 
to turn the water of the river and make his attack. 
. . . Drunken riot and mad excitement held pos- 
session of the town : the siege was forgotten ; 
ordinary precautions were neglected. ... In silence 
11 



162 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

and darkness the Persians watched at the two points 
where the Euphrates entered and left the walls. 
Anxiously they noted the gradual sinking of the 
water. ... At last shadowy forms began to emerge 
from the obscurity of the deep river-bed, and on 
the landing-places opposite the river-gates scattered 
clusters of men grew into solid columns ; the un- 
defended gateways were seized; a war-shout was 
raised ; the alarm was taken and spread. ... In 
the darkness and confusion of the night a terrible 
massacre ensued. The drunken revelers could 
make no resistance. . . . Bursting into the palace, 
a band of Persians made their way to the presence 
of the monarch and slew him on the scene of his 
impious revelry. Other bands carried fire and 
sword through the town. When morning came 
Cyrus found himself undisputed master of the 
citv." Thus and there were all the minutiae of 
prophetic utterance fulfilled; thus and there died 
Belshazzar. There two centuries later died Alex- 
ander the Great in a similar revel, after trying in 
vain to rebuild the city, its canals, walls, temple 
and palace. He knew not that the decree had 
gone forth — "the golden city ceased." 

Babylon the great has for ever fallen. Prophecy 
has become history, and the word of God standeth 
sure, and, blessed be his name, " the Lord knoweth 
them that are his." We can have unfailing con- 
fidence in our God, who will bring to pass whatever 
he has promised as well as threatened. No golden 



THE BIBLE AND BABYLON. 163 

city even, no principalities or powers of the wicked 
one, can thwart his great purpose with reference to 
his redeemed children. He shall bring them out of 
the great tribulation. He shall gather his elect out of 
a world that is passing away. What encouragement 
here for Christians ! and what warning to the un- 
converted, who are certain to be overwhelmed at 
last ! The golden city could not withstand God, who 
swept it " with the besom of destruction." So shall 
it be with the unrighteous, but God's people are 
eternally safe. They are journeying to a golden 
city which shall never cease — a city of jasper 
walls, with foundations of all manner of precious 
stones, with gates of pearl, whose builder and 
maker is God. 



CHAPTER XII. 

THE BIBLE AND THE COMMERCIAL CITY OF 
TYRE. 

" Who is there like Tyre, like her that is brought to silence 
in the midst of the sea?"— Ezek. 27 : 32. 

WE are to consider this commercial city at cer- 
tain great epochs, and we are to see how va- 
rious prophecies have been fulfilled in her history. 
Ezekiel devotes nearly three chapters, Isaiah one 
chapter and other prophets a few verses to por- 
traying the future of Tyre. They all predict the 
utter desolation that was to come, and our text 
might have constituted the sad refrain of each of 
the inspired writers : " Who is there like Tyre, like 
her that is brought to silence in the midst of the 
sea r 

I. Such a fate seemed unlikely in view of the 
prosperity and splendor of the city at the time of 
the deliverance of the prophecies. 

1. Tyre was situated on the eastern coast of the 
Mediterranean, being built both on the mainland 
and on an adjoining island half a mile distant, and 
it was in the latter position that her strength and 

164 



THE BIBLE AND TYRE. 165 

glory specially consisted. She might have been 
called, as Venice has been, " the bride of the sea." 
She is addressed as " at the entry of the sea " and as 
" in the heart of the seas," and as " the stronghold 
of the sea." She could not, however, conceive of 
such a misfortune as being " brought to silence in 
the midst of the sea." 

She had stood for centuries, and she seemed abso- 
lutely secure for all time. She boasted of her an- 
tiquity, as is evident from the question which Isaiah 
said would be asked in subsequent ages : " Is this 
your joyous city, whose antiquity is of ancient 
days ?" She could poiut to a hoary and venerable 
past. She could have told the author of our text 
that a thousand years before Joshua had spoken of 
"the fenced city of Tyre." She could have re- 
minded the prophet that four hundred years back 
her sovereign, Hiram, was called upon by Solomon 
for help in building the temple. When Herodotus 
visited her, a hundred years later than EzekiePs 
time, this father of historians, who went to see the 
famous temple erected to Hercules in that city, was 
told by the Tyrian priests " that from the building 
of Tyre two thousand and three hundred years had 
elapsed." With so many centuries of happy ex- 
istence the proud city would naturally be incred- 
ulous as to her predicted downfall. She was accus- 
tomed to say, " I am a god, I sit in the seat of God, 
in the midst of the seas." 

Being sea-girt, she considered herself as impreg- 



166 THE BIBLE VERIFIED, 

nable as mighty Sidon, whose daughter she was, 
and whose citizens the sacred writer had in mind 
when he spoke of people dwelling "in security, 
after the manner of the Zidonians, quiet and secure ; 
for there was none in the land, possessing authority, 
that might put them to shame in anything." That 
is the way the Tyrians felt — absolutely secure be- 
cause of their insular position. 

2. Besides, they were strongly fortified. We 
know what their walls must have been from a 
single stone which has remained to this day, and 
which measures seventeen feet in length and six 
and a half feet in thickness. Furthermore, in 
recent explorations at Jerusalem a shaft has been 
sunk eighty feet, and the foundations laid by Solo- 
mon have been disclosed, and some of these stones 
are twenty to twenty-six feet long. With reference 
to these we are informed (Wright's Ancient Cities) : 
" The calcium light revealed upon them Phoenician 
numerals, letters and other signs in red paint, which 
are supposed to be quarry-marks made by Hiram's 
masons." If the Tyrians were skillful enough to 
transport all the way to Jerusalem such immense 
stones, we may be sure their fortifications were 
massive, and sufficiently so to make their overthrow 
apparently impossible. 

3. Thus secure from surrounding water and 
mortar, Tyre prosecuted business with an enter- 
prise and success that have never been surpassed. 
Ezekiel gives a whole chapter to describing her 



THE BIBLE AND TYRE. 167 

commerce, and he seems to weave in all the geo- 
graphical names then known to show the extent of 
her traffic with the nations of earth. Well did 
Isaiah call her merchants " princes," for they 
bought and sold everywhere. They sailed the 
Black Sea, and returned, if not with golden fleeces 
for which the first Argonauts sought, at least with 
rich treasures. They had long before manned 
Solomon's ships, which sped down the Red Sea, 
and brought back from India not only the gold of 
Ophir, but also all manner of curious things, such 
as apes and peacocks, which had never been seen 
before in Palestine, and which created a great 
sensation there. The Tyrians had to furnish the 
sailors for these celebrated expeditions, and they 
never ceased to enrich themselves from the distant 
lands. 

They had gone all over the Mediterranean. 
They had planted a powerful colony at Carthage 
in Northern Africa. They had extracted wealth 
from the mines of Spain, till their ships of Tar- 
shish became as well known as England's East 
Indiamen are to-day. They are said to have found 
silver in such abundance that they did not have 
room to store it away in their vessels, and that they 
might utilize every inch of space they are said to 
have used the precious metal for their anchors. 
At any rate, according to Ezekiel, the rowing 
" benches" were of " ivory," while "fine linen 
with broidered work from Egypt " constituted their 



168 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

"sails/* and the ship's "awning" was made of 
"blue and purple from the isles." 

Nay, their gay merchantmen ventured out through 
the Pillars of Hercules ; they ran the very gauntlet 
of what was then a Gibraltar indeed as they moved 
out into the great and almost unknown Atlantic. 
Diodorus Siculus tells of their reaching what seemed 
to them the Isles of the Blest, and the Azores or 
Canaries in their tropical beauty must have seemed 
the "dwelling of gods rather than of men." They 
are believed to have gone clear to the British isles, 
and to have gotten tin at Cornwall, and Herodotus 
speaks of their getting tin from " the ends of the 
earth," although he was incredulous about what 
were called the Tin Islands (Cassiterides). 

Nor could he credit what was a fact, that these 
adventurous navigators before his day had sailed 
down the Red Sea, and that they had actually gone 
round the southernmost point of Africa, and had 
made their way back through the straits opening 
from the Atlantic into the Mediterranean. He re- 
lated how on his visit to Tyre the Tyrians had told 
him of their having reached a point where the sun 
was always north of them, where the shadows were 
always cast in one direction. " For my part," he 
says, " I do not believe them " ; and yet what they 
told him about the sun was positive proof that they 
had rounded the cape, thus anticipating by more 
than two thousand years Vasco da Gama, who by 
the same exploit in these comparatively modern 



THE BIBLE AND TYRE. 169 

times so astonished all Europe and gained undying 
fame. The Tyrians were ahead of him by only 
two millenniums; that is all. So long ago did they 
thoroughly understand the seas which they rode in 
triumph everywhere, while they made their city the 
wealthiest that ever existed as they gathered from 
far and near silver and gold, iron, tin and lead, 
emeralds, rubies, diamonds and "all precious stones." 
All these the prophet mentions, besides " choice 
wares, in wrappings of blue and broidered work, 
and in chests of rich apparel bound with cords." 
There ought to be mentioned also the city's great 
industry of extracting dye from shellfish, her facto- 
ries for this purpose being so numerous, according 
to Strabo, as to fill the air with an unpleasant 
odor. But a vast revenue was derived from this 
source. Any article bearing the delicate coloring 
of Tyrian skill was in universal demand. Juvenal 
speaks of " Tyrian tapestry " as something partic- 
ularly fine. Virgil speaks of the luxury of " Tyr- 
ian purple " for sleeping apartments. Homer, ages 
before, had sung of 

"Belts 
That, rich with Tyrian dye, refulgent glowed." 

While Tyre became the richest and most splendid 
city of antiquity, " the mart of nations," she pur- 
sued her commercial ends with such selfishness and 
with such utter disregard of God that she waa 
doomed to destruction. She had a form of godli- 



170 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

ness. She built a magnificent temple on her island, 
and this wonder of the world was what specially 
drew Herodotus to the city, and he was full of ad- 
miration for two colossal columns of gold and eme- 
rald which adorned the beautiful structure. He may 
have been mistaken in the material, but the appear- 
ance was that of two massive pillars of gold and 
emerald. So that the Tyrians had a form of godli- 
ness ; they had a house of worship which must have 
rivaled Solomon's temple — which must have equaled, 
if it did not surpass, the finest edifices in which the 
wealthy now meet. 

But they worshiped Mammon more than the true 
God, those Tyrians did, as people often do yet. 
They left no stone unturned to heap up riches. So 
selfishly did they seek gain that it is said (American 
Gydopcedia) if a Phoenician merchantman bound 
for some land of mineral wealth should find that a 
Roman ship was following, the master of the Tyrian 
vessel would run his craft upon the rocks, so as to 
lead the other to destruction, and on returning home 
the loyal citizens of Tyre would have his loss made 
good by the city ; so determined was she that other 
people should not learn of her sources of wealth. 
The story is not incredible when we are informed 
by the prophet that at the destruction of Jerusalem 
on a certain occasion Tyre said exultingly, u Aha, 
she is broken that was the gate of the peoples ; she 
is turned unto me : I shall be replenished, now that 
she is laid waste." It was for this unworthy spirit 



THE BIBLE AND TYRE. 171 

that the doom of Tyre was pronounced. She was 
to be utterly destroyed, until the lamentation should 
be, " Who is there like Tyre, like her that is brought 
to silence in the midst of the sea ?" 

II. We will now turn to see how the city, not- 
withstanding her strong insular position and her 
antiquity, notwithstanding her massive walls, not- 
withstanding all her resources which she possessed 
as " the stronghold of the sea," how in spite of 
everything and contrary to all human probability, 
was finally leveled to the ground. We will note 
the successive steps by which her ruin was accom- 
plished. There was wheel within wheel, but the 
divine purpose went straight forward. 

1. The prophecies were fulfilled in part by the 
siege of Nebuchadnezzar. The protracted nature 
of this siege was foretold when Ezekiel said, " Every 
head was made bald, and every shoulder was peeled." 
Was this the fact ? Josephus, on the authority of 
both Greek and Phoenician histories, states that the 
siege continued thirteen years. Even then it is 
said, by way of prediction, " yet had he no wages." 
Was the siege practically without result? was it 
without the usual spoil for the conqueror? It is 
not certain that the city was really taken. Or if it 
was, it may have been so impoverished as to have 
proved disappointing to the greed of the victor, who 
naturally would have had great expectations with 
reference to a city reputed to be very opulent. 

But Jerome would seem to give the best explana- 



172 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

tion of there being " no wages." He says, on the 
authority of Assyrian histories, that when the Tyr- 
ians found further resistance would be useless, " they 
went on board their ships, and fled to Carthage or 
to some islands of the Ionian and .ZEgean seas " ; 
and he adds that they took their valuables along. 
They were not, therefore, totally destroyed yet — 
not yet, in the words of the text, "brought to 
silence in the midst of the sea." But they were 
humbled under the mighty hand of Nebuchad- 
nezzar. It was not intended in the providence of 
God that utter desolation should come at once. 

Isaiah had expressed the extent of the humbling 
when he said, "Tyre shall be forgotten seventy 
years " ; that is, she was to share with the Jews 
the Babylonian captivity. "And it shall come to 
pass after the end of seventy years," the prophet 
continues, "that the Lord will visit Tyre, and she 
shall return to her hire," even w r ith " all the king- 
doms of the world." This also corresponds with 
the actual course of events. 

2. The city did renew her prosperity, and two 
centuries later she thought she was strong enough 
to defy Alexander the Great as she had done the 
Assyrian. She was not only seagirt, but she was 
surrounded with walls which were one hundred 
and fifty feet high on the side of the island next to 
the mainland. The brilliant defence which she 
made is a matter of familiar history. In resisting 
the great Macedonian in 332 B. c, even more than 



THE BIBLE AND TYRE. 173 

in opposing the Assyrian in 585, did she show her 
heroism. The later siege was only seven months 
as against the several years previously, but the 
struggle was more terrific. 

Alexander proceeded to construct a huge mole 
from the continent to the island, but no sooner did 
it appear above the water than it was furiously 
assaulted, and a fire-ship, driven into it, spread 
havoc, and a storm arose to assist in the demolition 
of the causeway, which sank out of sight in the 
raging sea. Again it was slowly built with great 
trees and rocks and earth, until it for ever closed 
the gap between continental and insular Tyre, and 
along it were pushed the engines of war, while a 
large fleet moved from the sea upon the fortifica- 
tions ; and, though even then the conqueror wavered 
in his resolution because of the strength of the 
city, he at length after a fearful conflict won the 
day. 

And were there any specific prophecies fulfilled ? 
It had been predicted, " They shall lay thy stones 
and thy timber and thy dust in the midst of the 
waters." In Quintus Curtius or in Rollin we can 
read that the portions of the city on the mainland 
were used to construct the mole or causeway to the 
island, and thus the stones and timber and dust of 
the city were literally laid " in the midst of the 
waters." From the same historians we learn that 
the city was fired, and thus the words of Amos 
came true : " I will send a fire on the wall of Tyre, 



174 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

and it shall devour the palaces thereof"; and 
Zechariah's prediction was verified : " The Lord 
will dispossess her, and he will smite her power 
in the sea ; and she shall be devoured with fire." 
Then Joel had prophesied: "The children also 
of Judah and the children of Jerusalem have ye 
sold unto the sons of the Grecians, that ye might 
remove them from their border : behold, I will stir 
them up out of the place whither ye have sold 
them, and will return your recompense upon your 
own head ; and I will sell your sons and your 
daughters." This unequivocal prediction was uttered 
four hundred and fifty years before Alexander's 
capture of Tyre, and the exasperated general did 
sell thirty thousand into slavery from that single 
city. In this connection it is " interesting to read 
on a clay tablet found at Nineveh," says Dr. W. B. 
Wright, " the contract of a Tyrian merchant with 
an Assyrian lady for the sale of two Hebrew 
slaves." But for such iniquity the Tyrians were 
sold into slavery by the destroyer of their city. 
Joel (800 b. c.) denounced the Tyrians for selling 
the Hebrews, and yet a Ninevite tablet now in 
the British Museum informs us that July 20, 709 
B. c, a century after the prophet's reproval, a 
Phoenician sold to a woman of Nineveh two He- 
brews for one hundred and thirty-five dollars. But 
the predicted recompense upon their own heads 
came when thirty thousand in captured Tyre were 
sold into bondage by Alexander. 



THE BIBLE AND TYRE. 175 

Nay, those who fled, as they had done before, 
to Carthage and other colonial possessions around 
the Mediterranean only fulfilled Isaiah's prophecy, 
which says : " Arise, pass over to Kittim ; even 
there shalt thou have no rest." Of Tyre's chief 
colony, the Carthaginians, it was sadly true that 
they had " no rest." With the three Punic wars 
which they waged through so many years with 
Rome, with such generals as Hannibal and Scipio 
to lead the respective armies, with the cry, " Car- 
thago delenda est " (" Carthage must be destroyed ") 
repeatedly awakening applause in the Eoman Senate, 
— with such familiar facts of history, verily those 
who were driven forth from the merchant city had 
"no rest," not even in the isles of the sea, not even 
in the colonial possessions fringing the Mediterra- 
nean. Says Diodorus Siculus : " They prevented a 
part of their children and wives from falling into 
the hands of the enemy by sending them away 
secretly to the Carthaginians," but they did not 
prevent disaster coming to them even there. 

3. And yet judgment was tempered with mercy. 
A blessing was predicted. Isaiah relieved the 
darkness of the future with a temporary gleam of 
light. He looked forward to a time when "her 
merchandise and her hire shall be holiness to the 
Lord : it shall not be treasured nor laid up ; for 
her merchandise shall be for them that dwell before 
the Lord." She was not to be " brought to silence 
in the midst of the sea " till she had received the 



176 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

gospel, and in a measure had accepted the same. 
Did that day ever come? 

Among the " great multitude " who came to hear 
Jesus and to be healed of their diseases were, 
according to Luke, people from " Tyre and Sidon." 
It was in the " borders of Tyre and Sidon " that 
the " little daughter" of the " Syro-phoenician " 
woman was relieved by the Lord of a demoniacal 
possession. Paul "landed at Tyre," where he 
found " disciples," with whom he remained a week, 
and by whom, " with wives and children," he was 
accompanied to the ship at his departure, while 
they prayed together " on the beach " and bade 
each other a tender " farewell." 

Subsequently Tyre became the seat of a Christian 
bishopric. There, in 324 A. d., Eusebius dedicated 
a fine cathedral, which he said he could not fittingly 
describe, " the grandeur that surpasses description, 
and the dazzling aspect of works glittering in the 
face of the speaker, the heights rising to the 
heavens." This ecclesiastical historian, comment- 
ing upon Isaiah's prophecy, says, " It is fulfilled in 
our time. For since a church of God hath been 
founded in Tyre as well as in other nations, many 
of its goods gotten by merchandise are consecrated 
to the Lord, being offered to his Church." Still 
later Jerome says : " We may behold churches in 
Tyre built to Christ ; we may see their riches, that 
they are not laid up nor treasured, but given to 
those who dwell before the Lord." 



THE BIBLE AND TYRE. 177 

4. But Jerome was astonished at the non-fulfill- 
ment of part of the prophecies. In the beginning 
of the fifth century of the Christian era he said 
Tyre was " the most noble and the most beautiful 
city of Phoenicia," and he asks how this can be 
made to agree with Ezekiel's prophecy, " Thou 
shalt be built no more." He did not seem to real- 
ize that centuries are required for the establishment 
of God's entire word. It was to be left, in the 
providence of God, to these later generations to 
witness the complete verification of the prophecy, 
that Tyre should be " brought to silence in the 
midst of the sea." 

We will not speak of the Saracen conquest of the 
city, nor of its subsequent recovery by the Crusa- 
ders, nor of its humiliation again under the Turk. 
Suffice it to say that since 1561 there has been the 
sure and final decline. Did Ezekiel say, " I will 
make thee a bare rock : thou shalt be a place for 
the spreading of nets"? In 1697, Maundrell 
saw it a desolation indeed, the miserable inhab- 
itants subsisting, he says, " chiefly upon fishing." 

Did the prophet say that the stones of the city 
should lie "in the midst of the waters"? Says 
the scholarly Robinson in 1838, from personal ob- 
servation : " The sole tokens of her more ancient 
splendor — columns of red and gray granite, some- 
times forty or fifty heaped together, or marble pil- 
lars — He broken and strewed beneath the waves in 
the midst of the sea." " Granite columns," says 

12 



178 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

another observer (Dr. Thomson in his Land and 
the Booh), " are thickly spread over the bottom of 
the sea on every side." Likewise we learn from 
Tristran, in his Land of Israel, that " for half a 
mile from the shore the sea flows to the depth of 
a foot or two over flat rocks covered by one mass 
of prostrate columns." 

Does Ezekiel further say, "Thou shalt be no 
more : though thou be sought for, yet shalt thou 
never be found " ? Renan confirms this. He writes : 
" A traveler who was not informed of its existence 
might pass along the whole coast without being 
aware that he was close to an ancient city." 

With such facts before us we can take up the 
dirge of the text, " Who is there like Tyre, like 
her that is brought to silence in the midst of 
the sea ?" Verily the word of the Lord does stand 
sure. Centuries may be required for its verification, 
but in the end every hostile power will be humbled, 
while the Church of God shall be preserved and 
exalted. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

BIBLICAL SIGNS PRECEDING THE DESTRUCTION 
OF JERUSALEM. 

"And as some spake of the temple, how it was adorned 
with goodly stones and offerings, he said, As for these things 
which ye behold, the days will come in which there shall not 
be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown 
down. And they asked him, saying, Master, when therefore 
shall these things be ? and what shall be the sign when these 
things are about to come to pass ?" — Luke 21 : 5-7. 

rpHE destruction of Jerusalem and of the temple 
-L therein by Titus in the year 70 A. d. was pre- 
dicted by Christ about forty years before the event. 
The disciples were amazed at the prophecy, and 
they could hardly believe that it would be fulfilled. 
They asked the Master what signs would precede 
the great catastrophe, and he told them plainly, as 
he sat with them on Mount Olivet with the Holy 
City in full view and shining resplendent in the soft 
glow of a setting sun. Let us glance at history 
and see if the signs predicted with much detail did 
take place. It might be said, by way of introduc- 
tion, that the signs seem to point primarily to the 
end of Jerusalem, and secondarily to the end of the 
world. There were, as Farrar has said, " two hori- 

179 



180 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

zons, one near and one far off," while he adds that 
as the signs "did usher in the destruction of Jeru- 
salem, so shall (they) reappear on a larger scale be- 
fore the end of all things is at hand." Confining 
ourselves for the present to the dramatic ending of 
the Jewish polity and dispensation, we will consider 
the signs that were to precede that first great day 
of the Lord which is symbolic of a yet more dread- 
ful day to come. 

1. "Before all these things" — was one of the 
signs — " they shall lay their hands on you and shall 
persecute you." This prophecy certainly was most 
terribly fulfilled before the year 70, when Titus de- 
stroyed the city and temple. James was beheaded 
by Agrippa, and Paul by Nero, before that date. 
The history of the apostolic Church was one suc- 
cession of religious persecutions. This is evident 
from the narrative of the Acts of the Apostles, and 
it is corroborated by profane history, which cannot 
be considered prejudiced in favor of Christianity. 
When the great fire broke out in Rome, continuing, 
says Suetonius, " six days and seven nights," until 
nearly half the city was burned down, Nero re- 
marked upon " the beautiful effects of the confla- 
gration." Now, this emperor himself was believed 
to have ordered the city to be fired, and, says Taci- 
tus, "to suppress the rumor he falsely charged with 
the guilt and punished with the most exquisite tor- 
tures the persons commonly called Christians, who 
were hated for their enormities. Christus, the 



THE DESTRUCTION OF JERUSALEM. 181 

founder of that name, was put to death as a crim- 
inal by Pontius Pilate, procurator of Judaea, in 
the reign of Tiberius : but the pernicious super- 
stition, repressed for a time, broke out again, not 
only through Judaea, where the mischief originated, 
but through the city of Rome itself, whither all 
things horrible and disgraceful flow from all quar- 
ters as to a common receptacle, and where they are 
encouraged. Accordingly, first those were seized 
who confessed they were Christians ; next, on their 
information, a vast multitude were convicted, not 
so much on the charge of burning the city as of 
hating the human race. And in their deaths they 
were also made the subjects of sport, for they were 
covered with the hides of wild beasts and worried 
to death by dogs, or nailed to crosses, or set fire to, 
and when day declined burned to serve for noctur- 
nal lights." Such is the language, not of a Chris- 
tian, but of a pagan, and of one whose life covered 
the latter half of the first century and the beginning 
of the second. The sign of religious persecution 
did then occur, and this very persecution, described 
by the Latin historian, raged six years before the 
destruction of Jerusalem. 

2. A second most improbable sign was, "This 
gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the 
whole world for a testimony unto all the nations ; 
and then shall the end come." Have we any evi- 
dence that this sign preceded the destruction of 
Jerusalem? The Roman empire was recognized 



182 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

in those days as comprising " the whole world/' for 
of the decree by Caesar Augustus Luke says, " All 
the world should be enrolled"; that is, the entire 
empire. Even with this limitation it would seem 
impossible that a religion whose Founder was cru- 
cified — a religion which antagonized all other re- 
ligions by pronouncing them false — a religion which 
did not flatter men, but called them guilty sinners 
— a religion which required self-denial and sacrifice 
of life even — a religion which, after all, did not 
propose to propagate itself by force, — it would seem 
impossible that such a religion should be so widely 
diffused in forty years ; but Christ staked his repu- 
tation on the prediction that before the destruction 
of Jerusalem, before 70 A. d., his gospel should be 
published in all the known world; and there is 
reason for believing that the prophecy proved true. 
Tacitus, in the quotation already made from him, 
says that the pernicious superstition was only sup- 
pressed in one place to break out in another, " not 
only through Judaea, where the mischief originated, 
but through the city of Rome itself, whither all 
things horrible and disgraceful flow." Pliny the 
Younger, who died about 116 A. d., writes: "Nor 
has the contagion of this superstition seized cities 
only, but the lesser towns also and the open coun- 
try." Clement, who was a contemporary of Paul, 
says of that apostle, " He was a preacher both to 
the East and the West ; he taught the whole world 
righteousness " ; and Paul died before the year 70, 



THE DESTRUCTION OF JERUSALEM. 183 

previous to which Christ had said the gospel should 
be published among all nations. When he foretold 
the sign he had but a handful of followers, but the 
sign did not fail. 

3. There were also to be great civil commotions 
— "wars and rumors of wars." Christ's advent 
was at a time of universal peace, the temple of 
Janus was closed. Nevertheless, there was to be 
within a generation the wildest disorder in govern- 
mental affairs ; so he prophesied, at least. 

Turning now for the period in question to Tacitus, 
and running over the contents of his Annals, we 
see such expressions as these: "Disturbances in 
Germany," " commotions in Africa," " commotions 
in Thrace," "insurrections in Gaul," "intrigues 
among the Parthians," " the war in Britain," " war 
in Armenia." So too from Josephus we learn 
what upheavals there were throughout the empire. 
" In all Syria," he says, the disorders were terrible ; 
" every city was divided into two armies," Syrians 
and Jews ; " so the daytime was spent in shedding 
of blood, and the night in fear." We are told 
that it was " common to see cities filled with dead 
bodies still lying unburied, and those of old men 
mixed with infants; . . . women also lay among 
them." No wonder with the dead thus scattered 
about promiscuously Josephus could only call the 
calamities inexpressible. Thirteen thousand were 
slain in Scythopolis. Ten thousand at Damascus 
had their "throats cut," Twenty thousand were 



184 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

killed "in one hour's time" at Caesarea. In Alex- 
andria neither old nor young were spared till fifty 
thousand lay dead in " heaps." Nor was it single 
provinces here and there which felt the commo- 
tions. The empire itself was rocking to its founda- 
tions just previous to the eventful year of 70. 
There were four emperors within two years, and 
all of them met with violent deaths. Nero, accord- 
ing to Suetonius, " drove a dagger into his throat " ; 
Galba was run down by several horsemen, and his 
head was cut off by a common soldier, who, " thrust- 
ing his thumb into the mouth," thus carried the 
horrible trophy; Otho " stabbed himself" in the 
breast ; and Yitellius was despatched by slow tor- 
ture and then " dragged by a hook into the Tiber." 
So that it was not now and then a province, but it 
was, as Suetonius says, " the empire," which was in 
a "disturbed and unsettled state." Such is the 
testimony as to the facts by historians who little 
knew that Christ had foretold all forty years before, 
when he declared there should be " wars and 
rumors of wars," nationality arrayed against nation- 
ality and king against king, before the end should 
come, before Jerusalem should be destroyed. 

4. Was there anything else to precede this great 
event? Yes. "Many shall come in my name, 
saying, I am the Christ; and shall lead many 
astray." Were there impostors of this kind? 
Josephus says there was " a great number of false 
prophets/' He mentions one by the name of 



THE DESTRUCTION OF JERUSALEM. 185 

Theudas, who persuaded many to "take their 
effects with them and follow him to the river 
Jordan," which he was going to " divide " ; and, it 
is added, "many were deluded by his words." 
We read again in the Jewish historian of an 
Egyptian who "'pretended to be a prophet also, 
and got together thirty thousand men," whom he 
promised that from the Mount of Olives he would 
show " how, at his command, the walls of Jerusa- 
lem would fall down." These are only examples 
of the false Christs, of whom Josephus says there 
was a " great number," and of whom Christ had 
prophesied there would be " many." The prediction 
and the fact accord. There was at the time a 
feverish expectation very favorable to impostors. 
Even the pagan Suetonius (and he ought to have 
known, because he lived in the latter part of the 
first and the beginning of the second century) says : 
" A firm persuasion had long prevailed through all 
the East that it was fated for the empire of the 
world at that time to devolve on some who should 
go forth from Judsea." It was because of this 
prevailing feeling that so many false Christs ap- 
peared, and the true Christ foresaw and foretold it 
all. It was one of the signs which were to precede 
the overthrow of Jerusalem. 

5. Another sign was to be destructive plagues, 
" great earthquakes," to use Luke's expression, " and 
in divers places famines and pestilences." Josephus 
mentions a "famine" in the reign of Claudius so 



186 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

severe that "many people died for want of what 
was necessary to procure food." Suetonius refers 
to a "pestilence" at Rome under Nero, and he 
says, " within the space of one autumn there died 
no less than thirty thousand persons." Tacitus 
speaks of a "failure in the crops, and a famine 
consequent thereupon." He also states that " fre- 
quent earthquakes occurred, by which many houses 
were thrown down." He alludes to one year 
wherein " twelve populous cities of Asia fell in 
ruins from an earthquake " ; and he adds, " It is 
related that immense mountains sank down, that 
level places were seen to be elevated into hills, and 
that fires flashed forth during the catastrophe." 
Josephus describes an earthquake where there were 
" amazing concussions and bellowings of the earth." 
Finally, Seneca in the year 58 writes : "How often 
have cities of Asia and Achsea fallen with one fatal 
shock ! how many cities have been swallowed up in 
Syria ! how many in Macedonia ! How often has 
Cyprus been wasted by this calamity ! how often 
has Paphos become a ruin ! News has often been 
brought us of the demolition of whole cities at 
once." In the light of such testimony how striking 
Christ's prediction, " great earthquakes, and in 
divers places famines and pestilences" ! 

6. Perhaps the most startling prophecy was that 
there should be what an evangelist calls " signs in 
sun and moon and stars," " terrors and great signs 
from heaven." Were there these? A comet "re- 



THE DESTRUCTION OF JERUSALEM. 187 

sembling," says Josephus, "a sword," hung omi- 
nously over the city a whole year. One night, 
according to the same witness, the temple was 
mysteriously flooded with a light bright as day and 
lasting "half an hour." On a certain evening just 
before sunset " chariots and troops of soldiers in 
their armor were seen running about among the 
clouds." Stranger than all, the priests one night, 
on going into the temple to perform their usual 
duties, " felt a quaking and heard a great noise, and 
after that they heard a sound as of a multitude, 
saying, i Let us remove hence/ " Such are some 
of the " terrors and great signs from heaven " which 
Josephus mentions. Tacitus, too, referring to the 
destruction of Jerusalem, says, " Armies were seen 
to engage in different parts of the sky; . . . the 
temple shone by the sudden fire of the clouds ; the 
doors of the temple were suddenly thrown open ; a 
voice, more than human, was heard that the gods 
were departing, and at the same time a great mo- 
tion as if departing." Josephus was a Jew, Tacitus 
was a Eoman, and neither was a Christian, but 
what they write as history Christ had spoken as 
prophecy. 

7. There was one more sign which was to be a 
precursor of the end: "When ye see Jerusalem 
compassed with armies, then know that her deso- 
lation is at hand. Then let them that are in Judiea 
flee into the mountains; and let them that are in 
the midst of her depart out." That was a sign 



188 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

that the Christians were to make their escape with 
all haste. Did it turn out as planned for ? Four 
years before the final catastrophe — that is, 66 A. D. 
— the Roman general Cestius Gallus marched upon 
Jerusalem, which was in a state of rebellion. He 
pressed the siege, and had he continued, says Jose- 
phus, " a little longer " he would have " certainly 
taken the city," and would have put "an end to 
the war that very day." But all at once he beat a 
retreat. Why ? " Without any reason in the 
world," says the Jewish historian. But there was 
a reason of which he was ignorant. It was doubt- 
less, in the providence of God, to give the Chris- 
tians their promised opportunity to escape. Upon 
the temporary withdrawal of the Romans the city- 
gates stood open for a while, but in a few days 
they were closed, and active preparations were car- 
ried on so as to resist the siege which was sure to 
be renewed. Before the blockade, however, " many 
of the most eminent of the Jews," says Josephus, 
" swam away from the city, as from a ship when it 
was going to sink." Among the many we may 
suppose the Christians to have been. Indeed, Eu- 
sebius, the Church historian, who lived from 265 
to 340 A. D., expressly says that they " by revela- 
tion left the city, and dwelt in a city of Perea, the 
name of which is Pella." Very soon after this 
providential escape came the army of Titus, and 
Jerusalem was destroyed, and also the temple with 
its goodly stones. 



THE DESTRUCTION OF JERUSALEM. 189 

Thus, before the actual destruction there were 
signs given of the approaching judgment, warn- 
ings which the disciples heeded to the advantage of 
their personal safety. But the vast majority lin- 
gered and suffered untold miseries. "They did 
not," says Josephus, " attend nor give credit to the 
signs that were so evident." Nor will many now 
regard the warnings of God. Desolation will some 
day sweep over them if they do not listen to the 
voice of mercy which precedes the infliction of 
punishment. The Lord makes no idle threats; 
every word of his comes to pass : it did of old, as 
we have seen, and it will in the future. We need 
not go down at the last with a sinking world, and 
yet we shall, as surely as did the ancient Jews, if 
we do not improve our opportunities. When the 
last great day of the Lord shall come, the end of 
the world, of which the destruction of Jerusalem 
is emblematic — when there shall precede this sol- 
emn consummation of human history still more 
fearful signs than have been considered — may it be 
ours to be caught up into the air before that final 
crash and wreck of nature preparatory to the evolv- 
ing of the new heavens and the new earth. May it 
be ours to dwell in the New Jerusalem which in 
the goodness of God succeeds the old. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

THE BIBLE AND THE DESTRUCTION OF 
JERUSALEM. 

"O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which killeth the prophets, and 
stoneth them that are sent unto her ! how often would I have 
gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her 
chickens under her wings, and ye would not ! Behold, your 
house is left unto you desolate" (Matt. 23:37, 38); "And 
as he went forth out of the temple, one of his disciples saith 
unto him, Master, behold, what manner of stones and what 
manner of buildings! And Jesus said unto him, Seest thou 
these great buildings ? there shall not be left here one stone 
upon another, which shall not be thrown down" (Mark 
13 : 1, 2) ; " And when he drew nigh, he saw the city and wept 
over it, saying, If thou hadst known in this day, even thou, 
the things which belong unto peace ! but now they are hid 
from thine eyes. For the days shall come upon thee, when 
thine enemies shall cast up a bank about thee, and compass 
thee round, and keep thee in on every side, and shall dash 
thee to the ground, and thy children within thee ; and they 
shall not leave in thee one stone upon another ; because thou 
knewest not the time of thy visitation" (Luke 19:41, 44); 
" Then shall be great tribulation, such as hath not been from 
the beginning of the world until now, no, nor ever shall be" 
(Matt. 24 : 21) ; " And thou shalt eat the fruit of thine own 
body, the flesh of thy sons and of thy daughters which the 
Lord thy God hath given thee ; in the siege and in the strait- 
ness, wherewith thine enemies shall straiten thee" (Deut. 
28 : 53) ; u And they shall fall by the edge of the sword, and 
190 



JERUSALEM DESTROYED. 191 

shall be led captive into all the nations: and Jerusalem shall 
be trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles 
be fulfilled" (Luke 21 : 24). 

fTlHE destruction of Jerusalem was very positive- 
-L ly foretold by Christ some forty years before 
the event. Nothing seemed more unlikely at the 
time. The disciples could hardly believe that the 
predictions would be verified. The city and the 
temple seemed too substantial and too glorious to 
be doomed to such utter ruin and desolation. There 
were three lines of fortification, containing single 
stones seventy feet in length. The walls were sur- 
mounted by strong towers which seemed impregna- 
ble. The temple was simply magnificent. There 
were pillars between thirty and forty feet high, each 
being an entire stone of white marble, and so large 
that three men with extended arms were required 
to reach around one. The gates were plated with 
gold and they swung on hinges of the same precious 
metal. The roof was covered with one mass of 
golden spikes to keep the birds from settling there- 
on. A golden vine with clusters of grapes and 
with each bunch as large as a man was the admi- 
ration of all. The rabbins said, " Like a true nat- 
ural vine it grew greater and greater ; men would 
be offering, some gold to make a leaf, some a grape, 
some a bunch : and these were hung upon it, and so 
it was increasing continually." Such was the tem- 
ple, and, says Josephus, at the rising of the sun it 
"reflected back a very fiery splendor," which forced 



192 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

people to " turn their eyes away, just as they would 
have done at the sun's own rays " ; while at a dis- 
tance, says this historian, the temple, which he had 
often seen, appeared a like a mountain covered with 
snow ; for as to those parts of it that were not gilt, 
they were exceeding white." It is not strange that 
one of the disciples said admiringly, "Behold, what 
manner of stones and what manner of buildings." 
These, however, were not to be left " one stone upon 
another." It was 70 A. d., under the Roman gen- 
eral Titus, that the catastrophe came. Let us brief- 
ly note some of the details of the siege as given in 
Josephus, Jewish historian of the time and an eye- 
witness of the successive stages of destruction. 

Not the least of the sufferings of the Jews came 
through the heads of various factions, each striving 
for the mastery within the doomed walls. The 
people had once asked for the release of the robber 
Barabbas in preference to Jesus, and now they were 
tormented by robber chiefs who with armed bands 
roamed the streets and plundered and killed, till 
there was such a reign of terror that the approach 
of the Romans was actually hailed with delight by 
the miserable citizens. Titus drew up his legions 
before the outer wall. His engines and battering- 
rams began to play. The former threw immense 
stones, which, flying through the air and shining 
white in the night, were at first avoided, but when 
painted black and thus rendered invisible in the 
darkness, they crushed whole ranks. There was 



JEEVSALEM DESTROYED. 193 

something irresistible in the steady battering of the 
ram, which was worked backward and forward " by 
a great multitude of men " with regular swinging 
strokes. One of the formidable machines, called 
Niko or Victory because it had never been known 
to fail, thundered away day and night till a breach 
was made and the outer wall was taken, and a great 
part of it was " demolished." The second wall was 
next attacked. Besiegers and defenders fought des- 
perately until it also succumbed, and Titus "de- 
molished it entirely." Not one stone was left upon 
another. 

Siege was laid to the third wall, and famine 
began its ravages. "A table," says the Jewish 
historian, " was nowhere laid for a distinct meal." 
All ate secretly and hastily, lest their provisions 
should be discovered and seized by the robbers, 
who ransacked houses for food, and who, lifting up 
children, shook them till they let go the morsels to 
which they clung in their hunger. People would 
steal out of the city for something to eat, and would 
be captured by the Romans, and would be crucified 
to the number of four hundred in one day. They 
writhed on crosses in sight of fellow-Jews, who 
crowded the wall above. This tragedy of crucifix- 
ion went on till there was actually a scarcity of wood 
for the making of the transverse beams. "His 
blood be on us, and on our children !" cried the 
Jews of Him whom they crucified ; and it was, as 
they also were nailed by the hundreds on crosses. 

13 



194 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

Meanwhile the progress was slow, the engines 
and works of assault being skillfully undermined 
and burned. Titus decided upon another plan of 
bringing the besieged to terms. He built, we read, 
"a wall round about the whole city." This was, 
as another has said, "a military palisade or rampart, 
made from the earth thrown out of the ditch and 
stuck with sharp stakes." In three days, the whole 
army being employed, was the work completed, and 
when properly garrisoned there was no possibility 
of ingress or egress ; the city could in time be 
starved into submission. How remarkable that 
Christ should have foretold this plan of operation 
forty years before the event ! — " The days shall come 
upon thee, when thine enemies shall cast up a bank 
[margin, palisade] about thee, and compass thee 
round, and keep thee in on every side." The 
Jews were completely hemmed in ; " all hope of 
escaping," says Josephus, " was now cut off, . . . 
together with their liberty of going out of the 
city." 

The famine became more terrible, whole families 
being swept off. Houses were full of the dying. 
In the streets were those who had dropped doAvn 
dead. The robbers plundered the corpses, and they 
would laughingly try the edge of their swords upon 
the naked flesh, and would sometimes thrust through 
those who " still lay alive upon the ground." For 
a while the dead were buried, but afterward they 
were only " cast down from the walls into the valleys 



JERUSALEM DESTROYED. 195 

beneath." Titus, going his rounds, saw with horror 
the decaying bodies, whose stench was unendurable, 
and, groaning aloud, he raised his hands to heaven 
and " called God to witness that this was not his 
doing." He seemed half conscious of playing into 
the hands of an overruling Providence. 

The famishing inhabitants stole away from the 
city in great numbers, and, it becoming known to 
the enemy that to save their money they swallowed 
it, the soldiers of Titus set to cutting " open their 
living bodies" in search of the hidden treasures; 
and sometimes "pieces of gold" were found, but 
" a great many were destroyed " in the " bare hope " 
of gain. Two thousand were killed in one night 
for the possible gold they might contain. Though 
the Roman general threatened his followers with 
instant death if they continued their horrible work, 
they still, when detection seemed unlikely, seized 
Jewish deserters, and, in the words of Joseph us, 
" dissected them and pulled polluted money out of 
their bowels." 

The famine increased till people gnawed old 
leather. "Wisps of hay were eaten, and shoots of 
trees sold at high prices for food. A wealthy 
woman of Perea who was caught by the siege in 
Jerusalem became so maddened with hunger that she 
slew her nursing child, and, says Josephus, " roasted 
him and ate the one-half of him, and kept the other 
half by her concealed" till the robbers, who had 
plundered her repeatedly, came again. When they 



196 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

came and " threatened her that they would cut her 
throat immediately if she did not show them what 
food she had," she replied that she had saved a very 
fine portion for them, and thereupon she "un- 
covered what was left of her son." When they 
refused to eat she reproached them for being more 
fastidious than a woman ; but she was allowed to 
finish herself the horrid feast, consisting of her 
own child's flesh. Away back in Deuteronomy it 
had been prophesied, " Thou shalt eat the fruit of 
thine own body ... in the siege and in the strait- 
ness, wherewith thine enemies shall straiten thee." 

Events fast hurried to a close. Titus called a 
council to discuss the expediency of destroying the 
temple, which flames were rapidly approaching. 
The decision was to save the holy house, and the 
advancing fire was ordered extinguished. But the 
Roman soldiers, exasperated by continued Jewish 
attacks, pressed forward, and one of them, mount- 
ing the shoulders of a comrade, contrary to orders 
applied a blazing torch to a temple window, and the 
conflagration was started. Titus at the alarm 
rushed to the scene and commanded the fire to be 
quenched, but his voice could not be heard in the 
din and confusion. He signaled with his hand, but 
every one was too excited to pay any attention. 
" And thus," says the Jewish historian, " was the 
holy house burnt down without Caesar's approba- 
tion." It was contrary to the wish of Titus, but 
it was in accordance with the prediction of Christ, 



JERUSALEM DESTROYED. 1<)7 

who had said, " Your house is left unto you deso- 
late." The whole structure was ablaze aud the fire 
roared like a volcano. The light was seen for miles. 
People gathered on the walls of the upper city and 
sent up their wailings. There was the "shout of 
the Roman legions," and there was the cry of de- 
spair from those " surrounded with fire and sword," 
while the hills round about returned the echo of the 
roaring conflagration, the shouting soldiery and the 
crying multitude. 

Zion only remained to be taken, and against its 
steep cliffs mounds were raised, and soon the batter- 
ing-rams were thundering away. The Jews were 
dejected, the Romans confident. A breach was 
speedily made in the wall ; a panic ensued ; the 
people, fleeing hither and thither, were hunted 
down, and the streets were made to flow with their 
blood. Orders were given for the demolition of 
" the entire city and temple." Three massive tow- 
ers, however, were spared, that future generations 
might see what " Roman valor had subdued." 
When Titus examined these he exclaimed, "We 
have certainly had God for our assistant in this 
war, ... for what could the hands of men or any 
machines do toward overthrowing these towers?" 
He was right. God had decreed it, and it had 
been foretold by Christ. Jerusalem was actually 
" trodden down," and Zion's wall, like the other two, 
was leveled. "The city," says Joseph us, "was bo 
thoroughly laid even with the ground by those that 



198 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

dug it up to the foundation that there was left noth- 
ing to make those that came thither believe it had 
ever been inhabited." Such was the end of a con- 
flict wherein one million one hundred thousand were 
killed ("and they shall fall by the edge of the 
sword"), and ninety-seven thousand were taken 
prisoners and sold, many of them, into slavery 
(" and shall be led captive into all the nations "). 

What now had Jesus predicted regarding the 
destruction of Jerusalem ? — " Then shall be great 
tribulation, such as hath not been from the begin- 
ning of the world until now, no, nor ever shall be." 
What says the Jewish historian in giving a sum- 
mary of the war? — "It appears to me that the 
misfortunes of all men from the beginning of the 
world, if they be compared to those of the Jews, 
are not so considerable as they were." The fact 
seems to have corresponded to the prophecy. And 
what is the judgment of the modern historian? 
Milman says : " Jerusalem . . . has probably wit- 
nessed a far greater portion of human misery than 
any other spot upon the earth." 

A triumph at Eome was voted to Titus for his 
splendid success. He was crowned with laurel and 
clothed in purple. His soldiers were arrayed in 
their finest uniform. The triumphal procession 
was set in motion amid shouts that rent the air. 
The tallest and most distinguished of the captured 
Jews graced the triumph. Carried along in the 
line of march were beautifully- wrought vessels of 



JERUSALEM DESTROYED. 199 

silver and gold. There were rarest wild beasts 
from all quarters of the globe to help make up the 
display. Ships were borne along in great numbers, 
and, after the manner of modern transparencies, 
magnificent pageants three and four stories high 
whereon was portrayed all the scenery of ancient 
warfare, such as "a happy country laid waste and 
entire squadrons of enemies slain," " houses over- 
thrown and falling upon their owners," soldiers 
pouring through breaches in walls, and other simi- 
lar scenes drawn true to the facts. Of this grand 
Roman triumph, decreed for the destruction of 
Jerusalem, there remains yet a witness in the Arch 
of Titus, still standing in one of the streets of 
the Eternal City. On that arch the traveler to-day, 
after the lapse of centuries, sees represented Jewish 
captives, the golden candlestick and the triumphal 
car of the Roman general. For eighteen hundred 
years that marble arch has been witnessing to the 
literal fulfillment of God's word. For all these 
centuries has Jerusalem been " trodden down of 
the Gentiles." 

Three hundred years after the destruction of the 
city there was a vain attempt by Julian the Ap e- 
tate to restore the Jewish polity with all the old 
paraphernalia of worship. This Roman emperor, 
for the express purpose, says Gibbon, of famishing 
an " argument against the faith of prophecy and 
the truth of revelation," gave orders for the r 
toration of the temple. From every part of the 



200 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

empire the Jews flocked, and engaged in the work 
of reconstruction. Rich men labored with spades 
and pickaxes of silver, and wealthy women carried 
materials in silk and purple mantles. But the en- 
terprise was strangely interrupted. According to 
both pagan and Christian writers of the time, when 
the rubbish had been cleared away and the subter- 
ranean caverns had been opened, flames burst from 
the long-hidden chambers, balls of fire rolled along 
the ground with thunderous noise, and the workmen 
had to abandon the undertaking. Whether it was 
a miraculous interruption of the work in accordance 
with contemporary belief, or whether it was a natu- 
ral and not unknown phenomenon of gases long con- 
fined exploding on coming in contact with outer air, 
the work, at any rate, was stopped. The times of 
the Gentiles had not yet been fulfilled, and Jerusa- 
lem had still to be trodden down for at least fifteen 
hundred years more. 

How long the malediction of Heaven against the 
Holy City is yet to continue in force we cannot say. 
Whether the Jews shall ever be actually restored to 
Jerusalem is a question of debate. But that a 
blessed future is in store for the chosen people upon 
their conversion to Christ is a part of prophetic 
teaching. After "the fullness of the Gentiles," 
says Paul, " all Israel shall be saved." The proph- 
ecies of Christ, the predictions of the New Testa- 
ment and of the Old, have to such an extent been 
verified that we can well believe in what yet re- 



JERUSALEM DESTROYED. 201 

mains unfulfilled of God's word. And there is 
the bright prospect, if not of an earthly Jerusalem 
restored, at least of a " new Jerusalem coming down 
out of heaven from God, made ready as a bride 
adorned for her husband." 



CHAPTER XY. 

THE BIBLE AND THE PECULIAR JEWS. 

" Lo, it is a people that dwell alone, 
And shall not be reckoned among the nations." — Num. 23 : 9. 

THE absolute uniqueness of the Jews as a people 
is here indicated. They were and are " pecu- 
liar," not only in the biblical, but in the modern, 
sense. 

1. The separateness of the Hebrews, predicted 
in Scripture, has been realized in history. They 
were to be altogether unlike others, and they have 
been. They were told just what to eat and what 
not to eat, their very diet being so prescribed as to 
make it necessary for them to live by themselves. 
From the apostles we learn what a holy horror 
there was among pious Jews of eating meats that 
had been sacrificed to idols. Matrimonial alliances 
were forbidden outside of the chosen circle, and 
even social relations were confined to the strictest 
lines ; to sit at the same table with sinners was a 
disgrace. How multiform were the ceremonial 
ablutions to cleanse from any defilement that may 
have been contracted from coming in contact with 
the unclean Gentile unawares ! This thorough ex- 

202 



THE BIBLE AND THE PECULIAR JEWS. 203 

clusiveness was peculiar to the Jews, and it was of 
divine ordering. God seems to have had a great 
plan which could be carried out only by the minu- 
test regulations. 

The human race was then in its childhood, and 
had to be governed accordingly. The only mis- 
take, perhaps, of the Jews was their holding on to 
childish things after they had become men and by 
various traditions adding to the rules. Still, in a 
general sense they were true to the plan mapped 
out for them by God; they were meant to be a 
peculiar people, clearly marked off from all other 
nations. 

" Lo, it is a people that dwell alone, 
And shall not be reckoned among the nations." 

The result is, that a Jew to this day is a Jew 
wherever he may be, and all down history he 
stands out separate and easily recognized. No 
other nationality can be thus distinctly traced from 
the beginning down. History opens with Abraham 
emigrating from "Ur of the Chaldees," and the 
migratory Jew is still marching on, as unique a 
character as ever. "Whatever the country, what- 
ever the age, the Jew is a Jew — peculiar. This 
national exclusiveness seems to point to the mould- 
ing hand of Him with whom a day is as a thousand 
years and a thousand years are as a day. Indeed, 
we can see somewhat of the divine purpose. 

2. It seems to us utter folly to worship idols, to 



204 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

bow before gods innumerable. But polytheism is 
apparently that to which humanity naturally in- 
clines. Indeed, the ancient world was wholly poly- 
theistic. The very idea of setting apart the Jews 
was to introduce and spread the doctrine that there 
is no God except Jehovah; and even the people 
who were chosen for this mission were themselves 
so tinctured with the prevailing religious notions as 
to be constantly going over into idolatry. God had 
to be severe with them ; he had to build walls, 
insisting upon entire separation and punishing the 
least intermingling with the heathen, or he could 
never have established the true doctrine of one God 
and only One. 

Strict as he was, it required centuries to make 
the Jews themselves thoroughly monotheistic. It 
was not till the captivity in Babylon that the serv- 
ing of strange gods was completely rooted out of 
their hearts. It took two thousand years to get 
just one nation indoctrinated, for when Christ came 
the Jews alone were believers in a single Deity 
pure and simple. The most cultured people on the 
face of the globe, the educated Greeks, held to 
"gods many" — so many that in their chief city, 
Athens, a Roman satirist could say it was easier to 
find a god than a man. 

This, then, is the second great peculiarity of the 
Jews : their exclusiveness was with a view to 
educating them into monotheism, and this with 
the ulterior purpose of bringing all mankind to the 



THE BIBLE AND THE PECULIAR JEWS. 205 

worship of one God. It required two thousand 
years to make one nation believe this doctrine, and 
nearly two thousand years more have passed away, 
and still the great majority of the race are idolaters. 
God understood the gravity of the situation when 
he set the Jews off by themselves ; he saw he must 
adopt the most stringent measures to overcome 
polytheism. It is very easy for us to ridicule 
idolatry, for there have been generations of train- 
ing back of us ; we have inherited the monotheistic 
doctrine. It is an inheritance which the Jews have 
given us, and to this source the world is indebted 
for the passing away of idols. 

To be sure, when Mohammedanism swept over 
three continents almost the very battle-cry was, 
" There is one God, and Mohammed is his prophet !" 
but Mohammed borrowed from Moses, and the 
Koran is an imperfect digest and mutilation of the 
Old Testament. We think it very peculiar for men 
to worship idols, whereas the peculiar thing about 
it is that we are not polytheists instead of worship- 
ers of one God — a peculiarity which has been ground 
into our very being by the persistent teaching of 
the Jewish Scriptures. What a power the Jew has 
been we see when we consider that were it not for 
his influence we to-day would be bowing down to 
stocks and stones, or at best to sun, moon and stars ! 
A peculiar people, assuredly, to whom can be 
traced, under the guidance of God, the overthrow 
of what is distinctive of heathenism, the debas- 



206 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

ing worship of material objects. The world is 
being revolutionized in this respect by Jewish 
doctrine. 

3. Another peculiarity of this people is the idea of 
a Messiah which they have introduced into history. 
Renan, the distinguished French skeptical writer, 
says : " What more than all else characterized the 
Jew was his confident . . . belief in a brilliant and 
happy future for humanity." It was the prophet 
Micah who foretold that out of Bethlehem should 
proceed a Ruler " whose goings forth are from of 
old, from everlasting." Away back in Genesis the 
promise was made to a Jew, " In thy seed shall all 
the nations of the earth be blessed." How very 
romantic that orthodox (not rationalizing) Jews are 
to this day reading the prophecies of a great 
Deliverer, and are hoping for his coming, or, at 
least, if not for the coming of a personal Messiah, 
for the coming of a Messianic kingdom ! The 
result is, their golden age is in their future. Heath- 
en nations look back to the glory of the past, and 
there is no inspiring hope ahead. The effect is seen 
in the people's lives ; there is nothing to cheer them 
on, and they sink into a fatalistic view of things ; 
they lose ambition and become dead weights to 
civilization. 

The Jews, however, are expectant ; glorious 
things are in store for them, and they are buoyant 
and courageous, and there is no likelihood of their 
dying out, as many another nationality has died 



THE BIBLE AND THE PECULIAR JEWS. 207 

Flash upon a people the conviction that they are 
going to make a mark in history, fill them with 
the thought of a future big with events, and they 
are ever rousing themselves to realize the pictured 
ideal. The Jews can never pass out of history so 
long as the hope of Messiah's reign keeps stirring 
them to nobler achievements, so long as they are 
for ever working up to the standard which they are 
sure will some day be reached. So that this Jewish 
doctrine of better times to come is lifting mankind 
into hopefulness, which is the necessary condition to 
successful development, for a disheartened people 
never yet accomplished anything. It puts the 
golden age not behind, but ahead, evermore furnish- 
ing a fresh incentive to exertion. 

And yet, it may be said, as the Jews number only 
six or seven (or at most twelve) millions in the 
whole world, their hope of a Messiah cannot have 
a very general influence. That is true to a certain 
extent, but where did Christians get their Messiah? 
It was Disraeli (was it not ?) who said that one half 
of Christendom worships a Jew, and the other half 
a Jewess — Jesus and Mary. The irony of this con- 
tains some truth. Christianity is of Hebraic origin ; 
salvation is of the Jews, the Master himself said, 
and to Christianity is due our modern civilization. 
And while our Christ is in the past so far as his 
historical environment is concerned, it is the future 
which is to witness his triumph. 

The millennium is yet to be, and all Christendom 



208 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

feels the thrill of what is to come. Not only actual 
believers in Christ, but all who have come under 
the influence of his teaching, are living in expect- 
ancy of wondrous developments. To such a height 
have our expectations risen that we would not be 
much surprised at anything which might happen. 
What with railroad and telegraph and telephone 
and phonograph, what with the springing to new 
activity wherever the gospel of Christ is known, 
what with the opening up of countries long unex- 
plored, Christendom is almost wild with expecta- 
tion. We cannot lie down in sluggishness; the 
breath of life is blowing over us with a freshness 
which makes every heart and pulse to bound. 
Thank God for the Jew, for the Messiah who 
sprung from the Jew, for that glorious hopefulness 
which only those nations have that are acquainted 
with the Messianic kingdom ! The gospel has but 
to touch heathenism and the dry bones begin to stir 
with life. Japan hears the story and rouses from 
the sleep of centuries, and is wide awake to enter 
the race which is to end in victory. Wherever the 
Jewish Scriptures are read, and only there, is there 
progress even of the material type, is there a reach- 
ing forward for the better things to come ; and when 
we think of it, how our respect for the Jew grows ! 
No other character has been so prominent in the de- 
velopments which go to make up history, appearing 
as it does at every turn in the slow unfolding of the 
divine purpose. 



THE BIBLE AND THE PECULIAR JEWS. 209 

4. There is one characteristic of the Jews as a 
Dation so peculiar that it has made infidels believers 
— namely, their wide dispersion in exact accordance 
with prophecy. When Frederick the Great asked 
his chaplain the strongest argument in a word for 
the Bible and Christianity, the answer very proper- 
ly was, " The Jews, Your Majesty." 

We read in Deuteronomy, " The Lord shall scat- 
ter thee among all peoples, from the one end of the 
earth even unto the other." Says the same author- 
ity, "A byword among all the peoples." " Sifted" 
is the expression of Amos, " among all the nations." 
" Wanderers" is the apt description of Hosea. 
" An hissing and a curse," declares Jeremiah. How 
literally has it all been fulfilled ! The Jews are 
found everywhere. Missionaries have come across 
them in China, and even in Central Africa. And 
a few years ago this paragraph was going the round 
of the religious press : " Beaconsfield has introduced 
into Cyprus, among the native troops from India, 
some Hebrews who claim to be descendants of the 
mercantile colony .... planted by the navy of 
Solomon." We could believe almost anything of 
so romantic, so peculiar a people. 

It is no wonder that so much used to be written 
about "the lost tribes of Israel," supposed to be 
hidden away somewhere in the earth, while when 
our American Indians were discovered it was grave- 
ly discussed in learned circles if they were not the 
long-lost tribes, while again some now are maintain* 

14 



210 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

ing that the Anglo-Saxons are the lost tribes. Still, 
that word " lost " appears to me altogether inap- 
propriate when applied to a people we could not 
lose sight of if we tried. There apparently is no 
country where they do not dwell, " scattered " as 
they are from pole to pole, " sifted" throughout the 
world ; and it need not be said that they have been 
"wanderers," giving point to the common phrase, 
" wandering Jew," and that they have been a " by- 
word " and a " hissing." 

Read mediaeval history especially, when the Jews 
had no civil rights, when they were burned by the 
thousands and when they underwent horrors whose 
very perusal makes the blood run cold. Read of 
the more recent Russian atrocities, and of the pres- 
ent race-prejudice against them at Saratoga, where 
they are excluded from a leading hotel. All down 
the ages they have been a marked class, and even 
now, in Webster's latest, we have the definition of 
"to jew" as to cheat, to swindle. Believers and 
unbelievers alike have used the term as one of re- 
proach, and so have been verifying prophecy. How 
can this peculiar accordance between prediction and 
fact be explained ? Is history with its wicked men 
even in collusion with prophecy to pass a fraud 
upon the world ? Nay, rather men have been un- 
conscious instruments in establishing the word 
spoken of old by the Lord. What a peculiar people, 
when not Christians alone, but infidels also, have 
been playing into God's hands to bring about the 



THE BIBLE AND THE PECULIAR JEWS. 211 

fulfillment of prophecies uttered hundreds and 
thousands of years ago ! 

5. One more thing with reference to this peculiar 
people. It is distinctly taught that as a nation 
they are to be converted to Christ, and even, 
according to some scholars, restored to Palestine. 
Zechariah asserts, " They shall look unto me whom 
they have pierced, and they shall mourn." " I will 
plant them upon their own land," speaks the Lord 
by Amos, " and they shall no more be plucked up." 
Jeremiah states, " I will gather you from all the 
nations, and from all the places whither I have 
driven you, saith the Lord ; and I will bring you 
again unto the place whence I caused you to be 
carried away." " I will," says God by Ezekiel, 
" assemble you out of the countries where ye have 
been scattered, and I will give you the land of 
Israel." Though these passages may have had a 
primary, they certainly have not had a complete, 
fulfillment ; and it must be admitted that they look 
strongly toward a literal restoration to the Holy 
Land. Be that as it may (and it is but fair to say 
that the weight of scholarship seems to be against 
it), a national conversion is predicted without doubt. 
Paul argues this expressly when he says that after 
the fullness of the Gentiles "all Israel shall be 
saved " ; and such has been the general belief of 
the Church. As far back as the year 400, Augus- 
tine, the great Latin Father, said, "That in the 
last times, before the judgment, the Jews (by means 



212 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

of Elias, who shall expound the law to them) shall 
believe in Christ, is a thing much asserted in the 
sayings and hearts of the faithful." In a similar 
strain the golden-mouthed Chrysostom, the great 
Greek preacher, spoke; and such has been the faith 
in all ages. 

The Jews are to be converted ; they are yet to 
figure largely in history. What if they are few 
and far between ? what if they do not exceed seven 
millions in number? It does not require many 
Jews to count for something. One Jew, and he 
taken out of prison, ruled Egypt, the richest coun- 
try of the time. Another Joseph may be born. 
One Jew, and he a poor captive of war, reigned 
over Babylon, the most splendid empire of antiquity. 
Another Daniel may be born. One Jew, and he 
nailed to a cross, now sways all Christendom, the 
most extensive kingdom ever founded. With refer- 
ence to this Jew everything is dated. The infidel 
recognizes him by the year which he writes at 
beginning a letter or which he publishes on the 
title-page of his skeptical book. When a gov- 
ernment coins money and when the commercial 
world transacts business, it is all done in some 
" year of our Lord" who was a Jew. Aside from 
this most prominent of all Hebrew characters, 
the Jew still keeps coming up in history with 
startling conspicuousness, as if to remind man- 
kind that his mission is not yet finished, as if 
to proclaim that he is still alive and that he means 



THE BIBLE AND THE PECULIAR JEWS. 213 

to live. He will not down, any more than Ban- 
quo's ghost. 

Now he appears as a shining star in the astronom- 
ical firmament, Herschel, or as the great Church 
historian, Neander ; again as the profound philoso- 
pher, Spinoza or Mendelssohn; once more as the 
marvelous musician, the grandson Mendelssohn ; 
or as a striking figure in recent French history, 
Gambetta; or still as the possessor of immense 
wealth, Rothschild, who through loans to the Turk- 
ish government is said to have a practical mortgage 
on the Holy Land, and who if he has could readily 
open the way for a literal return of his people to 
Palestine, and who at least does control the money- 
market of Europe and of the world ; or the con- 
spicuous Jew appears as "the man of destiny" in 
Beaconsfield, who a few years ago, whether we liked 
or disliked him, had as England's prime minis- 
ter more power than any other one person on the 
face of the globe. No ! no ! it does not require 
many Jews to shape history; one can do it, and 
does do it every now and then, as if to keep our 
memories stirred up to an appreciation of his 
splendid capabilities. The British occupancy of 
Egypt is stated to be " largely in the interest of 
Jewish capitalists, holders of Egyptian bonds n ; and 
now two Hebrews are even said to have bought the 
site of ancient Babylon. The Jews thus seem to be 
getting possession, not only of their own land, but 
also of the lands of their former oppressors, Egyptian 



214 THE BIBLE VERIFIED. 

and Babylonian. There is a millennial future for 
the human race, and the peculiar Jew is to bear 
a part in the momentous issues out of which shall 
be evolved the new creation, when all, both Jew 
and Gentile, shall know the Lord Jesus. 

Finally, in the study of such a subject how we 
are impressed with the fact that Jehovah is from 
everlasting to everlasting ! He is never in a hurry 
to accomplish his plans. He sits on his throne and 
controls stupendous movements which extend down 
the ages. Not only in geological formations, but 
in spiritual developments, he makes haste slowly. 
Vast stretches of time are needed to understand 
God. Away back in the beginning, during the 
successive steps of evolving order out of chaos, it 
is recorded, " And God saw that it was good " ; and 
perhaps only he could have seen the good then. 
When vegetation was so rank that the earth must 
have seemed one tangled mass of gigantic weeds, 
only the foreseeing eye of Divinity could have 
been pleased. u No mere man w could have recog- 
nized in the luxuriant growth great beds of coal 
for keeping teeming populations in the far future 
warm and comfortable. 

We sometimes now are inclined to think that the 
world is overrun with wickedness, and we query 
what will come out -of the mass of corruption; but 
God looks on and gives us the quiet assurance that 
" all things work together for good," and we are to 
trust him for the verifying of this declaration. 



THE BIBLE AND THE PECULIAR JEWS. 218 

The good time may not come in this generation or 
in the next or in the next, but we can rest in faith 
upon Him whose word shall never fail, though the 
accomplishment may demand cycle upon cycle of 
time. Through thousands of years he has been 
carrying the Jews, and he will not relax his pur- 
pose till all we who are his peculiar people, who 
" dwell alone " and are separate from the world, 
have been brought out of the great tribulation, out 
of the strife and the conflict, out of sorrow and 
trial and temptation, out of disappointment and 
woe, to join in song of praise around the throne in 
heaven : 

" Glory be to the Father, and to the Sod, and to the Holy 
Ghost : 
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be ; world 
without end. Amen." 



THE END. 



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